RE: A long but hopefully interesting introduction

> -----Original Message-----
> From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of ben syverson
> Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2005 8:15 AM
> To: semantic-web@w3.org
> Subject: Re: A long but hopefully interesting introduction
> 
[...] 
> > Of course you could always split the ontologies (in effect give each
> > user
> > their own ontology). That's more the way I've looked at it - i.e. each
> > user
> > has a view on the world, and is connected to those with similar views.
> > New
> > information is propagated through the network according to some
> > threshold
> > mechanism (e.g. two out of three of my friends believe fido is a dog,
> > so I
> > guess fido is a dog; if I believe fido is a cat and cats are disjoint
> > with
> > dogs than an inconsistency if created that will be automatically
> > resolved
> > using least change heuristic).
> 
> The only issue I have with that is that individual users wouldn't get
> the benefit of expanding on others' assertions. Every user would have
> to explicitly say "fido is a dog," or at least vote on the assertion,
> whereas if that "fact" were already established with a good confidence
> rating by others, you wouldn't have to weigh in on it.

I don't think that has to be the case. Under the right network conditions
(reasonable clustering and/or low enough thresholds), a newly introduced
fact that's not too contentious and that receives some initial support
should spread through all or part of the network nearly automatically. But I
can see it might be hard to make this sort of auto propagation compatible
with your probability/voting model (since you really need to be able limit
propagation with the possibility of inconsistency and I'm not sure you'd
ever get an inconsistency with probabilistic reasoning). 

> Thanks Geoff!
> 
> - ben

-Geoff

Received on Saturday, 5 March 2005 14:40:23 UTC