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

>[snip]
>
>Second, in order to avoid making every user learn logic and study every
>ontology, I envision "ontology certification authorities." These
>organizations will consist of logicians who make sure that an ontology
>is correct, summarize it and give it a seal of approval. Users can then
>freely pick and choose these ontologies with some confidence that they
>will behave as they expect. Note, users are still free to create their
>own ontologies and to use uncertified ontologies. Anyway, I think a
>variation of this solution is viable.

Now I will say PHHHT.  You can try that, but since I can publish any 
ontology I want at any web page in any language, and anyone else in 
the world can point to it - all you will have is the hope that your 
authorization service somehow means something.  I'm happy to let the 
market decide (in part because I'm pretty sure who will win), but 
that doesn't constrain anything related to this discussion as far as 
I can tell.

>
>[snip]



>  >
>>  So my suggestion, learn to live with it!!   If you cannot work in the
>>  real world of messy data and inconsistent semantics, then get the
>>  hell off the web.
>
>The problem is that there is more than just inconsistent semantics at
>stake here. There is the whole trust issue. Now trust is something that
>most proponents of the Semantic Web (including myself) say "we'll get to
>later." But if we want to get this thing off the ground, we're going to
>need an intermediate solution. Otherwise, the hackers and terrorists
>will find the Semantic Web ripe for the picking. They won't need to
>express contradictions, they can just ensure that there are so many
>false axioms that you can't trust anything that's concluded by the
>Semantic Web. I think imports is just the thing to handle this. With
>imports, you can make an explict trust statement! When you import a
>document, you say, "I trust this document" and reasoner that trust you
>can reasonably trust that document as well. I think imports is as
>cruicial to the Semantic Web as hyperlinks are to the the original Web.

I think referencing (i.e. semantic hyperlinks) are, I think imports 
will be a rarely used feature that will atrophy w/time.  Key point - 
if the SW is to work, we'd better come up w/ a solution we both can 
live w/or we both fail.

>
>>  What can we do?  Let's get some folks thinking about a modern view of
>>  inference and ontology where the whole (semantic) world is one huge
>>  interlinked ontology (as the whole web is one huge interlinked
>>  document) and figure out how to live with it - because if we can't,
>>  this whole enterprise is doomed from the start to be no more
>>  successful than current AI systems.
>
>I think this definitely a useful research direction, but I don't want to
>rely on it as the only solution. Even if this sort of solution is
>possible, I think it will take many years (or decades) to work it out,
and I don't think the world can wait that long for the Semantic Web.

right, so just as many other issues will someday be resolved for the 
web, we'll start using the Sem Web now and be resolving these issues 
for a long time to come -- hallelujah!!
  -JH

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Thursday, 23 May 2002 14:03:51 UTC