Re: ChatGPT and ontologies

On Thu, 9 Feb 2023 at 11:44, Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>
wrote:

> There's already been some discussion here on ChatGPT and the extent to
> which it can, or can't, do things like generate sparql queries and the
> like; and people may be getting bored of the ChatGPT hype. However, in
> case of interest, here's some notes on some lightweight playing with it
> as an aid in writing simple ontologies:
>
> https://www.epimorphics.com/writing-ontologies-with-chatgpt/
>
> tl;dr You can generate simple, superficial examples with it but it's of
> limited use for practical work atm, though tantalising close to being
> useful. Certainly don't trust it to do any inference for you
> (unsurprising). OTOH getting it to critique a trivial ontology (that it
> generated) for coverage of a domain was much better - so as an aid to
> generating checklists of features of a domain to consider during
> modelling it _might_ be of more use, even as it stands.
>

Thanks for sharing this. I know there is a tendency for people aligned with
Semantic Web to reject these technologies but in my view they bear close
scrutiny and are worth very serious attention. This doesn't mean we must
like everything about them, or they're the one road to [whatever].As a
phenomena this is an extraordinary turning point.

This makes the ontology-authoring experiment quite interesting, since the
ground is shifting under our feet. As a community we have longstanding
debates, instincts, styles and differences on the question of how much to
pull into an explicit model, versus leave in scruffy text-valued fields
(Dublin Core vs FRBR, for example). So alongside using these new tools to
help us continue what we were doing before, they also raise questions about
whether new modeling habits will arise. The LLMs are better than anything
prior at unpacking the intent behind human prose - but at what point do we
find they're good enough to actually affect how we model things? Can we
make ontologies simpler and easier to use, without letting bias and
weirdnesses creep in?

Has anyone been experimenting with fine tuning in this context? SHACL/ShEx?

> The step in the dialogues that really stands out, though, is when we
asked it to critique its own ontology. Its summary of features of
organisations that you might want to think about modelling was excellent.

Very much agree on this point. Also wondering whether it could be useful as
a technology to make the more formal aspects of SW/RDF technology
accessible to non specialists (e.g. proofs, complex rules)...

cheers,

Dan



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> Dave
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