- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 17:12:16 -0400
- To: "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@openhealth.org>, "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: "WebOnt WG" <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
> The real world fact is that we have to make some decisions in relatively > short order else we might be stuck with something that, if paradoxical, is > useless. > The reason I make such a strong statement is from personal experience. In 1983 I was involved in a project that collated experimental results of chemical reaction pathways in the brain -- involved in Parkinson's disease as well as calcium ion channel driven neurotransmitter release -- into a graph structure which had attached to it various axioms and equations. The "system" ran a simulation in a sort of Petri net fashion. The program took months to run and produced results. Some of the results were surprising, remarkable even. Going back over the network and the equations I couldn't figure out how these remarkable results would arise from the axioms and the initial state of the system. I just couldn't tell whether my results were real or artifacts of the system and hence I didn't publish (despite the urging of my professors). A couple of years later someone ran a sophisticated experiment and demonstrated in an observable fashion, the results that my software predicted. I've had regrets to this very day. If only I could have trusted my software ... *** Yet I am convinced that the "Semantic Web" will produce results that we will need to trust, and hence we really need to get these issues right. I have no doubt others in this group have similar stories but just to point out that I don't think I am throwing around hyperbole. Jonathan *** I called the language "SENSE" for "SEmantic Network Simulation of Events" :-))
Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 17:16:43 UTC