Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

On Dec 17, 2003, at 12:06 AM, Francis McCabe wrote:

> To answer Bijan's question:
>
> On Dec 11, 2003, at 2:43 PM, Bijan Parsia wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, December 11, 2003, at 05:00 PM, Francis McCabe wrote:
>>
>>> Ehem
>>>   Notwithstanding the technologies being discussed, *translation* 
>>> between ontologies is about as tractable in the general case as 
>>> mapping between English and Japanese.
>>
>>>  However, an approach based on translating queries is, in principle, 
>>> more doable than arbitrary mapping.
>>
>> Care to articulate the difference that makes the difference in your 
>> eyes?
>
>
> I do not have the energy to prove this, but there is an analogy with 
> the halting problem. The corollary to the halting problem is, of 
> course, that any *given* program/data set pair can be checked to see 
> if it halts (by simply running it).

And what? Waiting?

What if it halts after the heat death of the universe?

> In the case of Ontologies, I think that in practice it makes a 
> significant difference to map a single query from one Ontology to 
> another; compared to translating the entire ontology.
[snip]

Aha! Yes, I totally agree with this. I certainly have Jim Hendler 
dinning "Partial mappings!!!" into my ear constantly.

There are, of course, loads of issues, but not doing what you don't 
need to do seems verra wise.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2003 09:58:47 UTC