Pat (or anyone), (01)
OK, if what you describe is a potential solution, at what level of
technical maturity (using scale below, from the paper) would you rate this, and
please consider scalability as part of this assessement? (02)
1. Basic principles observed and reported.
2. Technology concept and/or application formulated.
3. Analytical and experimental critical functions and/or characteristic proof
of concept.
4. Component and/or breadboard validation in laboratory environment.
5. Component and/or breadboard validation in relevant environment.
6. System/subsystem model or prototype demonstration in a relevant environment.
7. System prototype demonstration in an operational environment.
8. Actual system completed and 'flight qualified' through test and
demonstration.
9. Actual system 'flight proven' though successful mission operations. (03)
Jim Schoening (04)
-----Original Message-----
From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, February 05, 2007 5:52 PM
To: Schoening, James R C-E LCMC CIO/G6
Cc: cuo-wg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cuo-wg] The next key question (05)
>CDSI WG,
>
> Given Pat Hayes' description (below) of what Jim Hendler refers to as
>"URI-based reference mechanism coupled with the standard for KR and other
>aspects is
>aimed exactly at scalability.":
>
> The key question now is: Could the above referenced technology
>(when it matures) be used to achieve semantic interoperability across
>large numbers of domains (with independently developed ontologies)?
>Any takers? (06)
Sure. The direct answer to your question is, no.
BUt that is because your question as posed misses the point: the open
publication paradigm allows ontologies to NOT be developed independently of one
another. They will cross-refer, use parts of other ontologies, and include
references - eventually, one hopes, 'nuanced' references - to one another in a
global network of semantic hyperlinks. And they will do this because to create
a useful ontology by re-using and linking in this way will be vastly easier
than building entire ontologies from scratch, in isolation from other ontology
building. Think of the SWeb as a growing ontology 'library', freelyopen to all
for modification and re-use. As pieces of this are written and found widely
useful, the number of links to them (and the economic pressure on the community
to find ways to preserve them) will grow, ensuring their even wider re-use.
This effect snowballs on the Web, as we all know. As far as I can see, the
pressures which make such phenomena as YouTube go from nothing to billions of
users in less than a year will still operate, albeit perhaps at a different
timescale, for the semantic web also. The semantic web is not just traditional
ontology engineering with XML added as a kind of afterthought. It is part of
the Web, and will be governed by Webbish laws of growth and distribution. (07)
Pat (08)
>
>Jim Schoening
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Pat Hayes wrote:
>>
>> OK, here's my take on that.
>>
>> First, "standard for KR". I think all that Jim means is, the SWeb is
>> intended to use whatever is the best available KR mechanism that can
>> be adopted as a 'standard', ie which a wide enough spectrum of users
>> can be persuaded to agree to use. No such choice will be free from
>> controversy. OWL wasn't and isn't free from controversy, and nobody
>> even knows if a large enough community can ever be brought to
>> consensus on an acceptable Rule language. But assuming that some WG
>> can get its job completed, and produces a useful notation, then that
>> can be used on the SWeb. There are plenty of potential candidates
>> which are way more expressive than OWL readily available. So it would
>> be a mistake to identify the SWeb vision with OWL or DL technology in
>> particular. OWL-DL is just the first in what one hopes will be an
>> evolving series of KR standards which will provide the infrastructure
>> of the SWeb. Perhaps the next one will be more like Python+Prolog on
>> steroids. Or it may be a breakthrough in CL reasoners using the
>> guarded fragment, who knows?
>> The decision is as much political as technical, or even subject to
>> whims of intellectual fashion.
>>
>> "URI-based reference mechanism" is more interesting. This is one of
>> the few things that really is new and different about the SWeb: it is
>> part of the Web, and subject to Web conventions and protocols. It
>> isn't *just* applied ontology engineering. So, every SWeb ontology is
>> required to use names drawn from a (literally) global set of names.
>> The scope of these names is the entire Web. There are no 'locally
>> scoped' or 'private'
>> names on the Sweb. So if your ontology uses a name for a concept, my
>> ontology can use it too.
>> Anyone can 'say' anything about everyone else's concepts, on the Sweb.
>> This is a whole new game, which nobody has played before. A can
>> introduce a concept called A:thingie1 and B can introduce B:thingie2,
>> and C can then, entirely independently and without asking for A or
>> B's permission, assert that (say) A:thingie1 is the same as
>> B:thingie2. A
> > and B may disagree: tough tittie, they can't stop C from making the
>> assertion. C can say things about A's ontology, in fact, such as
>> assert that it is all BS. The globality of the namespace has a whole
>> range of consequences which we are only beginning to explore. And
>> being URIs (actually IRIs these
>> days) , these names can also be used as identifiers which *access*
>> things on the Web.
>> Whether these accessed things should be the referents of the names
>> is currently controversial (I think not, in general), but that they
>> access
>> *something* is not even remotely at issue. So SWeb concept names
>> have a whole new dimensionality to them, which is (or at any rate
>> can be) orthogonal to their use as referring names. In particular,
>> it allows ontologies to "address" other ontologies (a pale version
>> of which is the OWL:imports primitive, but one can do a lot more
>> than this), which obviously has many potential applications relevant to
>scaling.
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> BTW, I entirely agree with Jim's optimism. I think people are way
>> too scared of inconsistencies. Lets wait and see what problems
>> actually crop up before trying to solve or avoid ones that we only
>> worry about rather than actually find.
>>
>> Pat
>>
>
>___ (09)
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