RE: Semantic Layers (Was Interpretation of RDF reification)

Hi Hans,

I'm not quite sure how I came to be on this distribution, but it is very
interesting and relevant to my private research. Thanks for copying me
in. John (Sowa)'s work has been one of my references, as are Austin,
Searle, Dennett (and Hofstadter, and Pinker, and Quine) amongst many
others.

I foresaw quite some time ago that we were in danger of aiming towards
an impossible dream with our "EPISTLE" model, and was relieved when we
called time on the data modelling a couple of years ago and got onto
pragmatic implementation methods.

You may recall at the February ISO-15926 / OWL / IDS / ADI meeting, I
was intrigued that one of the team indicated they were already looking
for pattern recognition / AI type methods for uncovering "implicit"
semantics, amongst those much-treasured explicit semantics we'd spent so
many man-years developing in our data model. Oh the irony. (Daniel
Rivers-Moore, a philosopher amongst us, spotted our problem years ago
BTW.)

I recall reading the Elephant paper previously, probably prompted by one
of John's references, and I recall that the focus on "conversations and
communications" as records in their own right, was exactly analogous to
our Template ideas - communications for a purpose. Complete records of a
transaction or exchange, that could be analysed for semantic patterns
later or "just-in-time". (Our Templates are our records.)

My earliest conclusion, (in my 2001 manifesto) was that even in the hard
(seemingly) objective world of engineering, semantics were always going
to be tied up in complex human (natural language) issues, and that "AI"
would in some sense be the only way we'd ever completely replicate them,
and no data model would completely solve our problem (in the same sense
as the world itself can have no absolute ontology or epistemology). That
said, I'm reasonably happy that our pragmatic implementation of
ISO-15926 using OWL (or similar) is as fit for purpose as anything in
capturing (and sharing) our explicitly modelled semantics - particularly
in well behaved applications. Provided we don't actually take away the
capability of human users to record what they actually "said", we can
always add capability to further process semantics implicit in the OWL
Templates.

I think our best model comes from Dublin; James Joyce :-)
(Just kidding)

Regards
Ian Glendinning
 
_______________________________________________________


-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Teijgeler [mailto:hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 10:06 PM
To: John F. Sowa
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org; psp@virtualTaos.net; ONTAC-WG General
Discussion
Subject: RE: Semantic Layers (Was Interpretation of RDF reification)


John,

Good to see you in this battlefield, after I left the ONTAC one.

I read your 27-page article Architectures for Intelligent Systems with
great pleasure, and I now started with the Elephant story, which is
quite old and sketchy, but via Google I couldn't find anything newer
(but perhaps my search criteria weren't good enough) :-)

When I read that architecture article I thought: Wow, I'd like to have
that FMF! But at the same time I realized that it would be too complex
for "normal" IT persons working in the industry. Grand designs are
thoroughly mistrusted in our industry.

That exactly is a major problem, because we really have to do our utmost
to hide the complexities of our OWL implementation for "normal" users
and IT persons, and still make it maintainable and extendable.

Perhaps our use of OWL isn't that sexy, because all we try is to map the
data of a zillion computer systems into a common format and store it in
a zillion triple stores, with the sole objective to integrate facility
lifecycle information represented by that data. No DL, no reasoning,
only SPARQL, perhaps a few simple rules. 

We only describe state information during decades of lifetime of a
facility, using a 4D data model. The data comes from those zillion
computer systems, and it is the responsibility of the users of those
specialized systems to come up with the proper data that comply with a
zillion rules and regulations (such as the ASME Boiler Code, the OSHA,
to mention some).

Having glanced into that Elephant document I simply can't visualize that
the work processes and their rules in the world we work in (process
industries, such as chemical plants, oil refineries) ever can be
expressed in whatever language. Perhaps it could, but the "cost of
ownership" (setting it up and maintaining it) would be prohibitive.

So, as much as I value your work, I think we stick to OWL, with all its
uncertainties and idiosyncrasies. We may be heading for a Titanic-like
disaster (as you seem to believe), but its music is nice...

Kind regards,
Hans
____________________
Hans Teijgeler
ISO 15926 specialist
Netherlands
+31-72-509 2005
www.InfowebML.ws 
hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl

======================================================

-----Original Message-----
From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 19:37
To: Harry Halpin
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org; Frank Manola; Adrian Walker; Peter F.
Patel-Schneider; psp@virtualTaos.net; ONTAC-WG General Discussion
Subject: Re: Semantic Layers (Was Interpretation of RDF reification)


Harry,

As much as I like logic, I admit that the most important questions of
life (and of engineering, which is what we're talking about in this
round of
notes) have never been and probably never will be formalized.

 > There is, as far as I can tell, no good theories of pragmatics  >
that are capable of being formalized. "Pragmatics", at least  > in
linguistics where I come from, is usually a sort of fuzzy  >
"hand-waving" solution to any hard problem, much as the terms  >
"world-knowledge" and "common-sense" knowledge are. Whenever  > I hear
the word pragmatics I want to reach for my axe  :)

Fuzzy hand-waving is generally bad, but it can be used to support any
topic whatever.  Just because something is covered with a veneer of
formalism doesn't mean it's good.  And just because some people have
used a term while waving their hands doesn't mean its bad.  (By that
criterion, the SemWeb would be bad.)

For an example of what good common sense and an intuitive feeling for
pragmatics can do, I suggest you compare the sales of Apple's iPod to
anything comparable that has come from Sony.

For an example of good pragmatics, I recommend John McCarthy's Elephant
paper, which I believe should have been required reading for anybody
working on the SemWeb:

    http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html

That paper was one of the inspirations for a paper I published in 2002:

    http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/arch.htm
    Architectures for Intelligent Systems

The Flexible Modular Framework (FMF), which is described in that paper
has become the primary platform for developing and deploying everything
we're doing in our VivoMind company.  Compared to that, everything I've
seen from the SemWeb is legacy stuff that's trivial to deal with by
importing it and converting it to usable formats.

I'm perfectly happy to let the rest of the world suffer with RDF and OWL
because they just kill off any competition we might encounter.

John


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Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2006 08:58:42 UTC