Re: Formal Semantics of OWL + RDF + SPARQL + SWRL

Hi Harry --

At 02:25 PM 12/8/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>While I appreciate Adrian's demonstrations, I'm just going to point out
>that while phrasing things in  natural language explanations will
>clearly be useful for the semantic web, it doesn't correct - in fact it
>makes worse - the questions of ambiguity that I think were trying to be
>addressed by formal semantics to begin with.

Hmm...  Please remember that, underlying our demonstration system [1], 
there is a formal declarative semantics, and the inference method is based 
on proofs of soundness and completeness wrt to that [2].  On top of this, 
we add some lightweight English processing so that people can see what the 
concepts we reason with are supposed to mean in the real world  [3].

So, saying that "natural language explanations will make things worse" 
would seem to be analogous to saying "don't ever put an English comment in 
your Java program -- it will only make things ambiguous".

Actually, what the system does may usefully be thought of as "making 
comments directly executable".

I hope this makes some sort of sense.  Thanks in advance for feedback.

                                 -- Adrian

[1]  Internet Business logic, online at www.reengineeringllc.com.  Shared 
use is free.

[2]  Backchain Iteration: Towards a Practical Inference Method that is 
Simple Enough to be Proved Terminating, Sound and Complete. Journal of 
Automated Reasoning, 11:1-22.

[3] 
www.reengineeringllc.com/Internet_Business_Logic_e-Government_Presentation.pdf




Adrian Walker
Reengineering
PO Box 1412
Bristol
CT 06011-1412 USA

Phone: USA 860 583 9677
Cell:    USA  860 830 2085
Fax:    USA  860 314 1029

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2005 20:32:31 UTC