- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:09:20 -0400
- To: Jos de Bruijn <jos.debruijn@deri.org>
- Cc: dreer@fh-furtwangen.de, public-sws-ig@w3.org
In the discussion of DLP and layering - some people have asked me off line why I don't think DLP is sufficient - my response is in terms of some use cases which come from real applications I've worked on - with small documents there's not a lot of issues, but when you come up against large companies actually using this stuff in deployed apps, a lot emerges, esp when data interoperability comes along -- here are the scenarios I worry about: 1 - Consider an organization like the Natl Cancer Inst which has a big OWL ontology (i.e. has a number of full time people working on curation, versioning, etc). They or some other org decide they'd like to use it on databases and datasets for datacleansing or other "rule based" operation. Recoding the whole into a new rules language would be prohibitively expensive unless there is some sort of automagic translator of some or all of the RDFS/OWL they use. 2 - Consider an organization using a number of rules to maintain their processes and transactions, they merge with another organization doing the same. The boss says "this is crazy, we have multiple definitions of key things we need in running the business, like the definition of a purchase order" - his golfing buddy convinces him he needs to use an ontology to do this and to merge data. Some mapping of rules to RDFS/OWL would make this much easier 3 - A large company has various activities going on. One group is using RDFS/OWL to manage corporate Web site assets. Another one is implementing the business rules that run a number of transactions through the corporate data infrastructure. Problems start to emerge where the data and the web assets are not consistent. Someone says, we need to see if the RDFS/OWL and the Rules are computing the same thing. (a real example, US Customs is looking at how to rationalize the representations used in their business process rules for transactions on databases, and their various product and country taxonomies) Some way to check consistency between some or all of the rules and ontologies is needed. All of these come from real cases I have worked on, all involved either large ontologies, large rule stores or both. Expecting any company to simply say "no problem" and do redundant work seems silly, and it is clear from examples like these that a synergy of Rules and Ontology makes great sense in the real world. Problem is DLP is too small a subset of OWL (or of datalog) to be of much use in most real world cases. There are other things being explored, like the Kaon2 work at Karlsruhe, that reconcile much larger subsets of OWL with datalog, and I think approaches like that have great value when looking at examples like the above. To put it another way, the "twin towers" is not just an imaginary problem, it comes up in practice and needs our communities to figure out approaches that will help people reach synergy between their Web and their Data spaces. -JH -- Professor James Hendler Director Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery 301-405-2696 UMIACS, Univ of Maryland 301-314-9734 (Fax) College Park, MD 20742 http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2005 17:09:47 UTC