RE: Reasoning engine

> From: Jingdong Liu [mailto:jingdong.liu@sympatico.ca] 
> 1. One of OWL foundations is frame-based system. That's a 
> different paradigm
> (but related to) from OO technologies. There's huge amount 
> information on OO
> analysis and design, but there's little for frame-based 
> systems in term of
> analysis and design, at least not a lot out of academic 
> world. Wonder how
> long it will take to fill in the gap?

I think it will take a while, just as it did for OO.  However, I think
many of the OO *description* techniques, such as design patterns, are
very well suited to frame systems, so we may well find that even if OOAD
cannot be re-used, the techniques involved in creating it can be.

> 2. Although current semantic web initiatives focus on 
> web-content processing
> and reasoning, eventually a wide range of applications will follow the
> trend. For example, I am currently interested in applying 
> these technologies
> along others such as multiagent systems into network and 
> system management
> area. Wonder if the semantic web initiatives take these into 
> consideration
> and keep such technology diffusion in the long term view?

In short... yes.  You may like to look at Network Inference's Cerebra
engine (http://www.networkinference.com/) as an example of an engine
that doesn't need the Semantic Web baggage.

> 3. XML, RDF, OWL, ... are expressive languages in essence. Is current
> programming language good enough to fit with them (or 
> knowledge engineering
> in broader view), or new programming languages are needed beyond lisp,
> prolong, ...? Also, most of software engineers are equipped 
> with Java and
> C/C++ now. Does the future software engineering sit on a 
> combination of
> expressive and programming languages, or a single language with both
> capabilities?

In what time frame?  In the short term, both sides co-exist.  In the
longer term, I think we'll see new languages emerging that combine both
- initially rather poorly, but with better capabilities as time goes by.
I'm not keen on describing any of this as 'the future of software
engineering' as SE is such a broad topic; these languages will penetrate
and survive for a while in some areas, will never penetrate others, and
will be rapidly superceded in yet others as newer and more powerful
formal systems are developed.  It's just that I don't know the relative
sizes of those areas!

		- Peter

Received on Sunday, 23 February 2003 06:46:25 UTC