RE: Feedback

Hello Sebastian,



I second Martynas' comment: the document is currently too abstract. Also (and I mean this in the best possible way!), I would try to avoid using too many buzzwords / name-dropping / fancy-sounding sentences without an indication on their relevance to your work. It will greatly improve the readability of the document.



If I'm not mistaken, your system accepts as input "plain" RDF (i.e., without any kind of ontological information), and, as a foundational aspect, attempts to perform "type inferencing" to infer the missing ontological information: initially, in particular, in the form of "kinds" (i.e., including classes and meta-classes?), and later in the form of contexts and behaviors. Perhaps it attempts to infer additional semantics as well?



A first question would be: why assume "plain" RDF? RDF is used exactly for annotating resources with ontological knowledge. If you are considering data sources of plain, unstructured text; works from the domain of ontology extraction can be applied to (you guessed it) extract ontologies and thus avoid having to deal with "plain" RDF. Similarly, plenty of work has been done in extracting ontologies from relational databases. In both cases, information / structure “hidden” in the original data source (text: nouns, verbs, synonyms, etc.; rdb: columns, data types) are used to obtain an ontology. So, one could say that your system works on a level of abstraction that may be too high; it should go down and make sure that it first obtains all available information from the original data source. If, for some reason, you are stuck with "plain" RDF without type information, you could have a look at formal concept analysis<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_concept_analysis> to extract concepts and concept hierarchies (similar to what you mention in your document; this is based on shared attribute values between objects).



Regarding “kinds”: it seems that your meta-classes could be modeled as subtypes (Employee at XYZCorp > Employee) or via reification of the “isEmployee” relation (isEmployee at XYZCorp). In that regard, it seems like you’re trying to re-invent the wheel, but I could be wrong. So: what’s the advantage of representing this information in your proposed way? The Venn-diagrams in your documents are confusing, and it seems like you’re indicating relations (e.g., subject > predicate-kind > object) instead of overlaps between sets. But clearly, this aspect of “kinds” is another foundational aspect of your work. Therefore, I would separate out this aspect and start from scratch to 1) indicate what they precisely represent (no wishy-washy statements, but rather concretely and formally define them), and 2) explain the need for them, i.e., why they would be a useful addition to meta-vocabularies such as RDF(S)/OWL.



Anyway, just my two cents. I’ve seen your emails go past a number of times now, and it seems that you’re going in circles (at least to me), since each document looks pretty similar to the previous one. A complete rewrite, focusing on one aspect at a time, could be of great benefit.





Kind regards,



William



William Van Woensel PhD
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Computer Science
NICHE Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS B3H 4R2 Canada
http://niche.cs.dal.ca/william-van-woensel









-----Original Message-----
From: Martynas Jusevičius [mailto:martynas@graphity.org]
Sent: November-21-16 8:17 PM
To: Sebastian Samaruga <ssamarug@gmail.com>
Cc: pragmaticweb@lists.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de; Juan Sequeda <juanfederico@gmail.com>; ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <metadataportals@yahoo.com>; Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>; public-rww <public-rww@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Feedback



Sebastian,



please name actual datasources (Wikidata, UniProt, whatever), vocabularies/ontologies (schema.org, Data Cube, etc.), data formats (XML, CSV) that you want to use, and most importantly -- for what specific purpose?



Right now your document is so abstract it is incomprehensible and not implementable.



Martynas



On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 1:06 AM, Sebastian Samaruga <ssamarug@gmail.com<mailto:ssamarug@gmail.com>> wrote:

> Hi all, in response to Timothy's request I'll try to describe real

> world problems / use cases I'm trying to solve: As the project I'd

> like to be realized in this endeavor is a general purpose (knowledge

> enabled) database back end with special features, use cases and

> problems may be the same of the ones solved by traditional databases

> but with semantic back end and special features provided benefits. So,

> it will not do much by itself but to provide the means of higher

> application / presentation layers taking advantage of such approaches.

>

> As the document I'm posting is kind of illegible stuff, I believe

> sharing its link for comments will be of great help for me when

> dumping my thoughts on the keyboard given useful advice is provided for making things clearer.

> Here is the Google Docs link (anyone can comment):

>

> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJbhTJSi907vrXfMtKly5biAMnoZJ5T-Kz


> iaIMIELuM/edit?usp=drive_web

>

> Please be patient. I have this bunch of ideas, all low level, protocol

> like (nothing like an 'application'), for back end and infrastructure

> of concrete semantic applications. Maybe not even a little part of all

> the document is worth reading material or is not well written. What

> I'd like is finally get to communicate my concepts to see if it is worth coding a 'proof of concept'

> of this 'semantic services database'. The reason I'm so insistent in

> having this feedback and potential consumers before I do some code is

> that I've made so many attempts before by myself and I didn't get to nothing alone.

>

> Best Regards,

> Sebastián.

>

>

> On Nov 19, 2016 7:58 PM, "Sebastian Samaruga" <ssamarug@gmail.com<mailto:ssamarug@gmail.com>> wrote:

>>

>> Hi,

>>

>> Trying to follow your advice I've added a Scope section at the

>> beginning of the document. The reason why I've found so difficult to

>> describe this 'application' is that it is not an application but it

>> is more like a kind of

>> (knowledge) backend database where (augmented) RDF and metamodels are

>> my 'relational' model. I don't know if exists some kind of 'relational algebra'

>> for RDF so I started writing my own. Please tell me if I'm missing

>> something important.

>>

>> Regards,

>> Sebastián.

>>

>>

>> On Nov 17, 2016 1:05 AM, "Juan Sequeda" <juanfederico@gmail.com<mailto:juanfederico@gmail.com>> wrote:

>>

>> Sebastian,

>>

>> Writing advice I got early on:

>>

>> - First write an abstract. If you can't summarize in a few sentences

>> what you are doing, then it is going to be very hard for other to

>> understand

>> - From the abstract, the following should be apparent

>> 1) What is the problem

>> 2) Why is it important (i.e. motivation)

>> 3) What is your contribution (what is unique/novel)

>>

>> Your introduction should dive into a bit more detail on this.

>>

>> You should be answer each of these questions in a succinct and crisp

>> sentence.

>>

>>

>> --

>> Juan Sequeda, Ph.D

>> +1-575-SEQ-UEDA

>> www.juansequeda.com<http://www.juansequeda.com>

>>

>> On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 4:56 PM, Sebastian Samaruga

>> <ssamarug@gmail.com<mailto:ssamarug@gmail.com>>

>> wrote:

>>>

>>> Hi all, its me again. I'm looking for feedback in this analysis

>>> phase of a project I'd like to start building soon. The reason I

>>> post this draft document again is that I've made some changes. I'd

>>> like to have some orientation in the right directions I should take.

>>> I hope not to be boring someone but 'cos what I'd like is to build

>>> kind of augmented ontologies and metamodels, seems like no one is willing to share this approach with me.

>>>

>>> Sorry if the document is a little rough written. I've wrote it all

>>> on a phone...

>>>

>>> Best Regards,

>>> Sebastián.

>>

>>

>>

>