RE: Cross-ontologies reasoning

At 22:36 +0100 12/19/03, Danny Ayers wrote:
>At 13:54 -0500 12/17/03, Jim Hendler wrote:
>>  all the useful tools I know of are human in the loop and partial-mapping
>based
>[...]
>>  cross ontology reasoning is the thing that makes Semantic Web different
>from all
>>  other AI ontology work to date
>
>These statements make a lot of sense to me. At the same time, they do not
>sound very encouraging as far as the Semantic Web is concerned.
>Unless the Semantic Web limits itself to a fairly small set of "canonical"
>ontologies (which is highly unlikely, given the open-ended nature of the Web
>itself), then the need of having humans in the loop seems to indicate that
>cross ontology reasoning within the Semantic Web is a very impractical goal
>right from the start.
>---
>
>Hmm, there are different ways you can read "humans in the loop". It may only
>be that they are needed once, to set up the mapping, after which the
>machines can be left to their own devices (so to speak).
>
>Cheers,
>Danny.

or like search engines - a bunch of stuff can happen in the 
background to make it easier to find potential matches and things, 
but at some point a human may be asked to help make choices - goal of 
machines on the web aren't always to get 100% correct answers but to 
help humans with their needs in managing this humongous info space

btw, although I am probably one of the main proponents of the many 
linked ontology vision, and think the eventual success of the SW will 
reside to a large degree in many linked vocabularies being used by 
combinations of humans and machines, there's a lot of value in the 
near future for single ontology applications, or the use of 
ontology/instance mappings (for example in photo search applications) 
and thus I don't think "the success of the semantic web" hangs on the 
cross ontology stuff -- the eventual ubiquity of the SW probably 
does, but we have a couple years till I expect to see that :->
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Wednesday, 24 December 2003 13:52:36 UTC