Re: Why not import everything? (was: Re: getting daml:imports right is easy?)

While I agree that the idea of saying what not to import is an
interesting one, I don't think it is a scalable solution. Every time
somebody comes up with a incorrect ontology, everyone who is concerned
about making sure their documents are understood correctly will have to
add a line to forbid importing it. I can envision a hacker that writes a
script which creates thousands of such ontologies every second. Imagine
the problems that would ensue.

As for the agent semantic negotiation idea, I am skeptical. It may be
possible, but I don't see it happening anytime soon. It sounds like a
really tough problem. Now, others may be equally skeptical of my imports
solution. I'll admit it may not be perfect, but I think it is a good
starting point, and I've already implemented a prototype that handles
the basic ideas.

Jeff

Pat Hayes wrote:
> 
> I agree, that is the only sensible way to look at it.  If/when we get
> around to putting something like this into the CL standard it will
> definitely be a special syntax, not a normal logical assertion. If it
> were an assertion it would have to be in a special meta-level
> concerned with ontologies as entities, and I don't think anyone wants
> to get involved with that.
> 
> However, I still wonder if we need it. Consider the admittedly naive
> assumption that anyone who uses a vocabulary is committed to using it
> the same way. Then we don't need importing: just use the same names
> is all you have to do. OK, so it is going to break down at times; but
> I bet 'imports' is going to break down at times as well, because
> people will misunderstand the intended meanings in complex
> ontologies, and so on. Seems to me that the only real purpose of
> having an 'imports' tag is to be able to NOT import some stuff you
> DONT want to agree to. So it might be more use, in fact, to have that
> as the primitive. That is, instead of having as a default that you
> might not agree with anything that you don't explicitly mention as
> imported, the SW might actually do better to base itself on the
> riskier, but more interesting, presumption that you agree with
> anything that you don't explicitly disagree with. Then engines could
> just troll around looking for content and put it together to draw
> conclusions, and could probably get a lot further than if they are
> restricted to the narrow channels of explicit import links. It will
> go wrong sometimes, but we have far harder interoperability problems
> to solve (involving genuine conceptual mismatchings), so I think a
> few simple disagreements are the least of our worries.
> 
> Q: What if my engine finds a contradiction between stuff it got from
> ontology A and ontology B? A: Well, it could just ignore them; or it
> could try to decide which of them was more likely to be right (using
> dates, maybe, or a Googlish kind of how-many-others-agree criterion)
> and maybe send them a notice telling them about the problem, if there
> was some way to do that.  Then one of them might want to change, or
> to exclude the other.
> 
> This suggests a vision of an SW which is in a constant process of
> self-repair. Imagine a kind of truth-maintenance protocol that
> allowed agents to negotiate differences of opinion. With a bit of
> care and a bit of luck, the SW might get to be more reliable in its
> opinions than the people who wrote the ontologies in the first place.
> At any rate, it could sort out sub-communities of ontologies which
> all use vocabulary terms in a consistent way. This would also, it
> occurs to me, provide some security against malicious bad-data
> ontologies which someone will almost certainly think of creating once
> the SW gets real.
> 
> Pat Hayes
> 
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Received on Wednesday, 8 May 2002 14:19:18 UTC