Re: SUO: Program Semantics
John,
Cyc would have been years ahead if it just pursued a FOL agenda at
inception. Many of us knew/know that. And suggested that then. We and
you told them so. But the important point is that they came around. So
this is just old "I told you so"itis.
Leo
"John F. Sowa" wrote:
>
> Bill,
>
> In your list of options, you forgot the biggest one: Cyc has been
> pursuing the "pragmatic" approach for 18 years (it started in 1984).
> Doug Lenat has been proudly proclaiming that he never put any feature
> into Cyc unless they found some application that needed it.
>
> By 1991, Lenat had discovered a need for a solid logic-based approach
> instead of frames, he had dropped the certainty factors of his "fuzzy"
> approach, and he had added contexts and microtheories. Those were all
> recommendations that I had made in my 1984 book (actually published at
> the end of 1983).
>
> I'm not claiming that I was using a crystal ball or Tarot cards.
> What I did was to analyze the published literature of AI, study
> what worked and what didn't, study the theoretical foundations for
> the various approaches, and make an informed estimate of what should
> be done. Doug could have saved many years of effort if he had
> taken the advice in my book when he was starting his project.
>
> What I am now recommending for SUO is based on another 18 years
> of the same kind of study of both theory and practice. And Cyc is
> one of the important projects that I've been watching over the years.
> My major complaint about your option A (adopted by SUMO) is that it
> is a warmed-over attempt to redo what Cyc has already invested 500
> person years in doing without coming close to their goals for 1994.
>
> Some comments on your comments:
>
> BA> 1) A successful search for "a proper structure for doing ontology"
> > depends on achieving some agreement on what ontology is. I just
> > don't see that coming along any time soon. I see at least three
> > camps here:
>
> I think that we are very close to agreement. The major obstacle
> now is the SUMO group, which has been ignoring the evidence.
>
> BA> Camp A: We'll call this Microsoft camp for convenience. Believes
> > that having a standard stock of categories of sufficiently broad
> > reach and functionality that users will be attracted to use it,
> > thereby achieving interoperability more or less by fiat. This
> > approach is completely pragmatic, laying no claim to, but willing
> > to borrow from theory in whatever field may have something to
> > offer.
>
> Your name is inappropriate, since Microsoft right now is doing
> something quite different. Bill Gates had been a sponsor of the
> Cyc project in the early '90s, but he dropped the sponsorship partly
> as a result of some influence from my former buddies at IBM -- George
> Heidorn, Karen Jensen, and Steve Richardson. George and Karen have
> recently retired, but Steve is pursuing an approach they had initiated
> at IBM: parse machine readable dictionaries and other texts to build
> up a knowledge base. Their current MindNet system doesn't have axioms,
> but it is a very solid (and much larger) competitor to WordNet. It is
> not theory based, but it's good as far as it goes.
>
> SUMO might be a better name for Camp A, except for the last line of
> your description. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that the SUMO
> group is willing to "borrow from theory".
>
> BA> Camp B: We'll call this the Peirce camp for convenience. Believes
> > that those in Camp A are nuts - that only some sufficiently subtle
> > method of reconciling language use amongst users/systems will work.
> > This view is strongly connected with an anti-realist philosophical
> > view that there is nothing "out there" in the world to get hold of
> > as a basis for doing ontology.
>
> Again, your choice of name is wrong. Peirce was very much a realist,
> and one of the leading experimental (and theoretical) physicists of
> his day. Besides his many achievements in logic, Peirce was the first
> person to recommend the use of a wavelength of light as a standard for
> defining the meter. And then he designed and built the equipment to
> use light waves to measure the pendulums he had designed for measuring
> gravity. So I have no idea which SUO subscribers belong to Camp B.
>
> BA> Camp C: We'll call this the the formalist group for convenience.
> > Believes that some sufficiently general mathematical principles can
> > be applied to enable interoperable domain ontologies to be built,
> > but posits only a minimal set of categories needed to make the
> > system go, but that these are not strongly connected to any signs,
> > images, symbols, words, or anti-realist concepts.
>
> Again, I don't know who you are talking about here. The IFF group is
> certainly formalist, but they have been developing a framework that can
> accommodate an infinite set of categories. They are happy to accept
> SUMO, OpenCyc, WordNet, IMPS, and any other set of categories anyone
> can give them. As far as I can tell, they are the most pragmatic
> of all the SUO subscribers.
>
> I'll skip over several paragraphs of your note, since you don't mention
> any names, and I have no idea whose positions you are criticizing. But
> you do mention one group that is familiar:
>
> BA> The WWW community has taken this view to the limit, proposing a
> > dizzying array of semantically crippled quick-fix languages and
> > claiming to be doing "ontology".
>
> I certainly agree. They have ignored everything that has been done
> in AI for the past 40 years. The RDF notation, which was originally
> designed by R. V. Guha, who was formerly the associate director of Cyc,
> is a trivial subset of what Cyc was doing in 1984. Guha proposed the
> version 1.0 of RDF, and he hoped that a much richer language would be
> developed for version 1.1. But since then, the W3C has been hung up
> on pursuing such low-level details that Guha withdrew in disgust. He
> is still on the RDF committee list, but he hasn't participated in any
> of their work for over two years.
>
> BA> In my view we can do much better without crossing the line into
> > "big question" territory.
>
> I agree that we can do much better, but I must point out that the W3C
> has never even approached "big question" territory. They are still
> mucking around in extremely low-level details.
>
> And I'll comment on the following point that also mentions some names:
>
> BA> I think our first order of business should have been to entertain
> > a couple or three truly "top-level" structures. IFF represents one.
> > Nicola's stuff represents another. And perhaps the Peirce camp could
> > offer a third. Then we run all three off against a series of mutually
> > agreed upon challenge problems and let the chips fall where they may.
>
> I see these proposals as mutually supportive, not competing. I believe
> we should synthesize them into a framework that includes all of them.
> And I've done that in my paper, "Signs, Processes, and Language Games":
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
>
> One paragraph I completely agree with is your conclusion:
>
> BA> If only 50% of the effort spent arguing on this list were directed
> > at some effort(s) to build something which can be evaluated by someone
> > without a PhD in philosophy or computer science, then there would be
> > no need to worry about things being forced down our throats - the
> > results would speak for themselves.
>
> Amen, I say. And to back it up, I've been working with a group of
> people who have formed a new start-up company called VivoMind LLC,
> which is doing exactly that. For a brief overview of the kind of
> technology that is going into the VivoMind company, see the slides
> I presented at the Knowledge Technology 2002 conference on March 13th:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/negotiat.htm
>
> If you want to see how to map different ontologies that describe the
> same structure, read the slides starting with the title "Representing
> a Physical Structure" and ending with "Mappings found by VivoMind".
>
> If you want to see how the technology scales up to real applications,
> read the slides starting at "VivoMind for Legacy Re-engineering".
> That is an implemented application that saved several million dollars
> for the company that had employed Majumdar and Leclerc to do the work.
>
> If you want an overview of the kind of technology being developed by
> VivoMind LLC, see my paper "Architectures for Intelligent Systems":
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/arch.htm
>
> If you want to know some of the people involved in the company, read
> the names mentioned in the slide "Implementing the Answer".
>
> John Sowa
--
_____________________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst The MITRE Corporation
mailto:lobrst@mitre.org Intelligent Information Management/Exploitation
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