Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

On Dec 24, 2003, at 6:00 AM, Graham Klyne wrote:

> At 18:21 20/12/03 -0500, Bijan Parsia wrote:
>> Interesting, code sharing exactly occurred to me as a relevant thing 
>> to consider.
>
> I don't know if this is a useful perspective, but I've noticed that 
> code sharing seems to be much easier when programming in Haskell 
> compared with (say) Java or C.  I find I can generally pick up 
> third-party functions and just use them, more easily than with more 
> conventional programming languages.

Yes, the advantages of, oh, referential transparency had occured to me.

> I can imagine two possible contributors to this effect:
>
> (a) ultimately, many Haskell expressions are just values, so in some 
> respects they're closer to data than to code.  There isn't a 
> procedural aspect to get in the way (e.g. no need to coordinate 
> passage through the "von Neumann bottleneck"? cf. [1])
>
> (b) the type system (being highly polymorphic, having much in common 
> with ML and friends) permits, even encourages, typing details that are 
> not relevant to some function to be left unspecified.
>
> I'm not sure if this has anything to say about ontology sharing.  
> Maybe that reducing assumptions made by any given ontology makes it 
> easier to share?  (Hmmm... that sounds almost obvious.)

There are two issues (at least) with code sharing: Getting enough 
adoption so there's lots of code to share, and then making it 
relatively painless to share.

There is a lot of *some* kind of code sharing going on . Take Java as 
one example.

OWL like ontologies seem way closer to data sharing. Rules do get quite 
close to code sharing. Whether this is a difference that makes a 
difference is the question.

Interestingly, of course, that expression (or code) as values seems to 
push code sharing toward data sharing.

(Note, lest anyone mistake me: I think the data sharing problem to be 
highly non-trivial :))

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Wednesday, 24 December 2003 10:26:10 UTC