Re: Semantic Web Languages

Tim --

At 12:08 PM 3/30/2006 +0100, you wrote:
>So now maybe we are ready to move on in other areas. Specifically on the
>subject if rules: I am baffled by the various attempts to devise new
>syntaxes for small subsets of PROLOG. Can the various semantic web rule
>languages do anything that PROLOG could not do better decades ago?

I think you are right -- the answer to your question is No.  However, for 
reasons I don't understand, any mention of Prolog seems to be the kiss of 
death for funding these days.  This may be because the Japanese Fifth 
Generation project consumed a lot of money then stopped.  Of course, what 
they were mainly spending on was building parallel hardware, with AFAIK few 
ideas about how they would use it to do anything.

At a more technical level though, Prolog does have some drawbacks.  It's a 
great programming language, but it fails to implement the full declarative 
potential of the logic aspect -- left recursions explode, all answers over 
a data graph with a loop runs forever, cuts are messy, and so forth.

So it seems a good idea to build on Prolog's strengths, increase the 
declarativeness with better inference methods, and to label the results 
"logic programming", or even "executable specifications".  This is part of 
the approach we have taken with the Internet Business Logic 
system**.  There are some materials about how this relates to the Semantic 
Web  [1,2,3].

Hope this makes sense.  Thanks in advance for comments.

                            -- Adrian

[1]  www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/paper/19

[2]  www.semantic-conference.com/program/sessions/S2.html

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



** Internet Business Logic (R)
Executable open vocabulary English
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com
Shared use is free

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, 30 March 2006 17:28:40 UTC