Re: Cross-ontologies reasoning

Bijan, Graham --

The distinction between code and data is getting ever fuzzier....

See, for a simple example, MergeOntologies1 at www.reengineeringllc.com .

As its name would suggest, it's a merge of two ontologies.  It's also 
executable, although not by means of Java, C or such.

Comments ?             Cheers,  -- Adrian



At 10:23 AM 12/24/03 -0500, you wrote:

>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 10:43:15 UTC