Re: AW: [ontolog-forum] Current Semantic Web Layer Cake

On 4 Aug 2007, at 05:16, John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> For further discussion of these and other issues, see
>
>    http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/fflogic.htm
>    Fads and Fallacies about Logic

Nice paper. Thanks. You conclude that:

[[
In summary, logic can be used with commercial systems by people who  
have no formal training in logic. The fads and fallacies that block  
such use are the disdain by logicians for readable notations, the  
fear of logic by nonlogicians, and the lack of any coherent policy  
for integrating all development tools. The logic-based languages of  
the Semantic Web are useful, but they are not integrated with the SQL  
language of relational databases, the UML diagrams for software  
design and development, or the legacy systems that will not disappear  
for many decades to come. A better integration is possible with tools  
based on logic at the core, diagrams and controlled NLs at the human  
interfaces, and compiler technology for mapping logic to both new and  
legacy software.
]]

"The logic based languages of the Semantic Web are useful, but they  
are not integrated with the SQL language of relational databases"

I would say D2RQ does this in a very elegant way, that would be worth  
standardizing:
http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/D2RQ/
and so does virtuoso
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/

"the UML diagrams for software design and development"
I think Elisa Kendall is working on mapping RDF to UML, MOF and so  
on... My feeling is that RDF will replace those technologies, since  
you can do the same but with a clear global dimension to it. I  
listened to a talk of hers some time ago
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/uml_mof_mda_owl_how

But yes, you are right, these are not adopted globally yet.

I think it would have been interesting in your article to point out  
what the semantic web brings to logic programming that did not exist  
before. My opinion is that it is the URI. If you open a logic  
textbook people will always start defining symbols to name things.  
They will say these symbols uniquely name some thing. Then throughout  
the whole book, everyone uses the symbol P(x) to mean whatever they  
meant in the previous sentence.
In logic programming you could always write something like

Bachelor(x) :- Unamarried(x), Man(x) .

But you knew that someone else could define those terms differently  
so you could not merge the work from different groups easily, even if  
you thought it was of the highest quality. The semantic web takes  
this global naming seriously, and makes it clear how all these  
technologies can work together, how they can be integrated. Neither  
UML, MOF, nor SQL nor prolog nor any of the other languages made this  
clear.

Henry

Received on Saturday, 4 August 2007 07:36:58 UTC