Jim(s) et al, (01)
I think Jim H's comment refers to concerns in the early web about it not
scaling well. Obviously, it does scale. But at a price...the current web
freedom (semi-anarchy) means it's hard to find the useful information in
a timeframe that's acceptable. Especially to military types. The use of
URI's and a standard web KR language greatly increased the utility of
the WWW, among other ways, by improving search. But the decentralized
nature of the open web encouraged some types of activities (broader and
better search, although the bar for word searches is not set especially
high) while hindering others (such as standardized upper level
representations). (02)
Let me take an aside to discuss the scenario in the paper. Wow. If you
could actually develop a military plan in a distributed fashion by
agents alone, it's time to check into the prices of airline tickets to
Stockholm. It is a phenomenally difficult problem. And I think too far
to grasp right now. The information to build a good plan does not solely
reside in databases. Most of it is in message traffic. So, until you get
entity extraction of events and relationships, in context, down the plan
stuff will be really hard. (03)
I'd recommend the low lying fruit first. If you could get the Army
logistics _databases_ to talk to each other all the way from the Camp
supply sergeant to the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army for
Logistics, that would be a useful and achievable goal. With one vertical
line then build out horizontally to other services or DLA. Perhaps they
should connect just at the top level or they may need to cross talk at
all levels. That's a big task right there. And immediately adds value in
a manner that can be quantified. Last I heard the Army did not know how
many Humvees it had in the inventory. I bet FEDEX knows exactly how many
trucks it has. (04)
I recall saying I'd be the resident contrarian in this group when I
joined. I am not convinced that any one upper representation will work,
or perhaps just as important, endure. I think if we had smart systems
that could understand term definitions in context the upper standard
would not be required. For instance, the Russians build a fine aircraft
with their designation of SU-27. NATO gave it a codename of Flanker. The
Russian pilots call it a Swallow (for its graceful lines). Bottom line
in my world is that it is a fighter, and quite capable. I don't care how
others refer to it, as long as I know it's a fighter and I have its
capabilities cataloged, I am a happy camper. I think this gets back to
Jim H's point of it's my local mappings I care about. Where the details
bite us all, it the "not with full fidelity" part of Jim's comment. That
approach is fine when there's no worry about the local insurgents
overrunning your base. When the bullets are flying, time and accuracy
matter - a lot. So the decision here is how much fidelity is good enough
in this environment. (05)
Don Conklin
Lockheed Martin IS&S
7021 Harbour View Blvd, Suite 105
Suffolk, VA 23435
757-935-9581 Office
757-935-9563 Fax (06)
-----Original Message-----
From: cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cuo-wg-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Schoening, James R
C-E LCMC CIO/G6
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 7:40 AM
To: cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cuo-wg] Resolving Jim Hendler's comments on paper (07)
CDSI WG, (08)
Jim Hendler (the Semantic Web guru) provided the below comments to
the attached paper. (09)
We'll soon resolve all his technical comments, but let's first
address his bottom line (found in last message): (010)
"I think the bottom line is that I buy your argument if
you were saying current
technology defined as DL reasoners manipulating OWL
assertions, but that's not
what the Semantic Web is all about, and the URI-based
reference mechanism
coupled with the standard for KR and other aspects is
aimed exactly at scalability." (011)
Request: Let's more than one of us try to explain what he refers to as
"URI-based reference mechanism coupled with the standard for KR." (012)
Jim Schoening
U.S. Army C-E LCMC CIO/G6 Office
Voice: DSN 992-5812 or (732) 532-5812
Fax: DSN 992-7551 or (732) 532-7551
Email: James.Schoening@xxxxxxxxxxx (013)
----------------------------------------------------------
At 5:35 PM -0500 1/29/07, Jim Hendler wrote [to Jim Schoening]: (014)
>James - Interesting paper, fwiw, I couldn't disagree more. You
>make the mistake, which is common and being pushed by a number of
>strong players <<snip>>, of assuming that only with some kind of common (015)
>semantic model can data be integrated - problem is the same argument
>you use as to why this is so (the scaling arguments) were very similar
>to the arguments made on why the WWW wouldn't work a decade or so ago. (016)
>Think of it this way - if I coudl create a set of local mappings across (017)
>a wide array of linked (but not all linked) data sources then I could
>indeed do cross domain integration - not with full fidelity - but
>that's where your mistake lies - when I ask Google to find things, I
>don't care if it finds all and only the right thing - I want it to take (018)
>me closer to a correct starting point for exploration, and I don't
>demand (or in fact want) 100%
>precision or recall. I don't have time for details,
> <<snip>>
> -JH (019)
------------------- (020)
At 10:33 AM -0500 1/30/07, Jim Hendler wrote [to SICoP]: (021)
>I guess I should mention here something I told the author separately -
>I don't agree with many of the conclusions of this paper, and think
>there are some flaws - I don't have time for a detailed response - but
>let me point out that if you made this same argument by analogy for
>hypertext systems (lack of standards, disagreement in worlds views,
>different technologies) then you could clearly demonstrate that a world (022)
>wide web of billions of documents linked to each other to be used in
>multiple contexts would be impossible (how would you find anything??) - (023)
>the analogy isn't perfect, and there are some valid points made in the
>paper - but it buys way too heavily into the assumption that no
>integration can take place without complete (and consistent) semantic
>agreement - and that's the part I cannot agree with, that doesn't
>appear to be true in practice, and that has been being used by many
>critics from the traditional ontology space (where that assumption is
>made) to argue that you can't do data integration at a large scale with (024)
>the approaches we're exploring. I've said this many
>times in many contexts - Tim Berners-Lee (who never listened to those
>skeptics who explained why the Web wouldn't work) and Eric Miller and I (025)
>addressed this issue in some degree in the paper at [1] ad of course
>I've written and talked a lot about this. So before you all throw out
>the baby with the bathtub, I thought I would mention that there are
>contradicting views
> -Jim H
>p.s. Actually, probably the best argument I made as to why we couldn't
>ever succeed with any kind of "everyone must agree" (standard upper
>ontology) approach was in the original brief to the Director where I
>convinced DARPA to invest in the DAML program - so this isn't
>something new, and those who've heard me at the Semantic Web in E-gov
>conferences have heard this argument.
>
>[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/07/swint (026)
------------------------ (027)
At 1:12 PM -0500 1/30/07, Jim Hendler wrote [to Jim Schoening]: (028)
basically same thing basic argument as I put on the list, but a little
stronger in my comments on upper ontology... Sorry to weigh in so
strong, but I think you really missed a lot of the point of the Sem Web
technologies and how they were designed precisely to provide the
capabilities you say they don't. I certainly don't think they are the
be-all and end-all, but they move us much further than you give them
credit for - part of the problem is you completely miss the key aspect
of these languages as opposed to previous AI languages, which is the URI
basis - they are "webized" in a deep and important way - the linking of
concepts (where ontologies can link to concepts in others) provides a
mechanism you've largely missed. I realize I
had the opportunity to weigh in to some of this stuff in SICOP, but I've
had the debate with Leo and others ongoing for the past 6 years and they
still haven't gotten it and I get tired of having the same arguments
over and over. The good news is the large players are beginning to get
it (not only Oracle and IBM in DB systems, but MS and others are
starting to use RDF DBs because they need the flexibility and the
linking) so I've given up on arguing in closed circles - I still write
articles and give plenty of talks
the key is, like the web, learning to live with inconsistency and
ambiguity, rather than claiming you can't do integration in its
presence.
<<snip>> (029)
-JH
------------------------------- (030)
At 12:08 AM 1/31/07, Jim Hendler wrote [to SICoP]: (031)
The goal of that paper is to claim (and later papers have more details)
that the current technology is exactly aimed at achieving
interoperability at the semantic level at a Web Scale, which certainly
subsumes large enterprises
with many domains. I've published several
papers on this ranging from vision papers like the Scientific American
article and the agents on the semantic web (google scholar for Semantic
Web finds these) and more technical ones - our technical papers are at
http://www.mindswap.org/papers. (032)
There's obviously no way to prove that ?X can be done with current
technology, what I'm arguing against is your equally unprovable
contention that it can't. What I do believe is your arguments ignore
significant aspects of current technology (esp. the Semantic Web work)
that take it much further towards what you are claiming it cannot
achieve than you seem to think. I don't have time to recap all the
arguments here, but I think the bottom line is that I buy your argument
if you were saying current technology defined as DL reasoners
manipulating OWL assertions, but that's not what the Semantic Web is all
about, and the URI-based reference mechanism coupled with the standard
for KR and other aspects is aimed exactly at scalability. (033)
I don't have time for a long email discussion on this right now, I simpl
wanted to remind the forum that there is argument with your contention,
and that not everyone agrees (both of which are self evident arguments). (034)
I leave it to the readers of your paper to think about these issues -
that's all.
-Jim H. (035)
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