RE: Cross-ontologies reasoning

Also, let's not forget that obstacles to code sharing are not only of a technical nature. There are also all kinds of social implications as well, related for example to personal satisfaction ("I prefer to write my own code because I have a lot of fun doing that"), to political reasons ("the code a write gives power to myself/my organization/my company, and I am not going to give it away like that"), fear of personal exposure ("God knows what kind of bugs are in my code - I don't want everybody else to find out"), etc. As a personal anecdote, I still remember the reaction of a development manager at a large corporation when he was asked to share his organization's code with other organizations within the same company: "I would not share my code even with my mother".

It will be interesting to see if and in which measure this kind of social aspects will affect ontology sharing.

Ugo

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@isr.umd.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2003 7:24 AM
> To: Graham Klyne
> Cc: Ugo Corda; public-sws-ig@w3.org
> Subject: 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 12:56:07 UTC