SUO: Re: Missing Ingredients
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MI. Note 5
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JA = Jon Awbrey
RC = Rich Cooper
TJ = Tom Johnston
Rich,
We are beginning to talk like working programmers,
and that will let me to descalate my poetry a bit.
The things that you have been saying to us for the
last year or so are very like the things that I was
always intermittenly saying to my friends and myself
from about 1970 or so, but I did not sit down to the
computer to play until about 1980 -- I blissfully skip
over the childhood diseases of Cobol and Fortran, since
that hardly counts as anything that anybody'd call "play".
Of course, it is presently an even-numbered day, nunc at my hic,
and so I should be getting back to the school of thought that
tries to do everything by starting at the top and working up,
but "it may be possible to proceed normally ..." -- to echo
an onymous rumble -- and to arrange a continuation of this
modus operandi et vivendi.
Middle Line. If you were up to investing a couple of months' work,
you could probably save yourself about 30 years of trial and error
along this very line of inquiry that you are currently staking out.
The work part would be -- there's always a catch, but you knew that --
learning how to read my purple pascal prose, and dialogging with me
on the documentation task that I have put off for over a decade now,
documentation having always been about as much fun as pulling one's
own teeth without an esthetic. At any rate, at a very slow rate, I
have begun this task on my Inquiry List -- it looks like I was most
active last in March of this year:
http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/inquiry
http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/thread.html
See the filiations of the "Theme One Program" (TOP):
TOP. Theme One Program -- Source Code
01. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000115.html
02. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000116.html
03. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000117.html
04. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000118.html
05. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000119.html
TOP. Theme One Program -- Expository Notes
01. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000100.html
02. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000101.html
03. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000102.html
04. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000103.html
05. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000104.html
06. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000105.html
07. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000106.html
08. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000107.html
09. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000108.html
10. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000109.html
11. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000110.html
12. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000111.html
13. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000112.html
14. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000113.html
15. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000114.html
TOP. Theme One Program -- Commentary Notes
01. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000120.html
02. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000121.html
03. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000122.html
04. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000123.html
05. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000142.html
06. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000143.html
07. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000144.html
08. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000145.html
09. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000146.html
10. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000147.html
11. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000148.html
12. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000149.html
13. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000150.html
14. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000151.html
15. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000152.html
16. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000153.html
17. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000154.html
18. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000155.html
19. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000156.html
20. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000157.html
TOP. Theme One Program -- Commentary Notes by Function Name
01. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000158.html -- Fore
02. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000160.html -- Graft
03. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000161.html -- Pinch
04. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000162.html -- Switch
05. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000163.html -- Stitch
06. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000164.html -- Splice
07. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000165.html -- List
08. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000166.html -- Roll
09. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000167.html -- Image
10. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000168.html -- Token
11. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000169.html -- Tally
12. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000170.html -- Gist
TOP. Theme One Program -- Motivation Notes
01. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000141.html
02. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000181.html
And I will send the Pas and Exe files to anybody who wants them.
TJ: 1.1. Our goal, I take it, is to increase the
semantic interoperability of databases.
This means, I take it (although I have
found no description of any such thing
on the SUO website), is to create a
registration framework for real world
databases.
JA: There's about 20 years worth of research on "deductive databases"
that I can remember just since the first standard textbooks began
to appear. But you said bottoms-up, and I'm all for that, well,
let me check -- yes, it's an odd-numbered day where I am, so OK.
JA: Let us try to approach the question
of "semantic inter-operability" (SIO)
by way of the following sub-questions:
JA: 1. What is the "meaning" of a "set of sentences" (SOS)?
JA: 2. What is the "meaning" of a "table of tuples" (TOT)?
JA: 3. How shall we compare the "meanings" of these two?
JA: I will give you and me both time to think and then get back to you.
He's ba^3ck ...
RC: This set of three questions is the most important triple
we're dealing with in all SUO work. Getting clear answers
to how meaning is represented, communicated, stored, compared,
and organized would be a successful result.
RC: We have predefined the answer to be an ontology.
Then we refined that concept to include the lattice
of ontologies, plus the IFF framework, but I still get
the feeling there's a lot of stuff left out.
RC: So I agree with Tom that the focus should be refined further to
incorporate real world database concepts, and I add one more
suggestion; that we should be working with natural language
words and sentences to impose the type structure, or class
structure, and property lists, of common everyday concepts
like address, customer, person, ..., fill in your favorite
concepts.
RC: Finally, since we haven't been able to agree on more enhanced
ontologies than WordNet, perhaps we should start the bottom-up
process by extracting exactly the ontology that WordNet provides.
This could be one of the bottom-level concept sets, along with
others that may appear in the lattice as we continue.
Let me tell you what I would do -- easy for me to say,
because it's what I've been doing, what I very quickly
found myself forced by the brutal realities of the task
into doing, for many odd years, and many even years, too.
Stepwise refinement! Indeed, layerwise refinement!
If you are really serious about starting at the _|_,
I mean that rude mechanical rag and bone shop of the
NP-heart, then you will simply have2start simple, too.
When it comes to language, hang on to your dear old mutter tongue
in day2day speech, but none of us has much clue yet what it means
to tackle a gadshillion-year naturally-electively evolved organon
like what we so condescendingly call a "natural language". Don't
mess wit mutter nature, unless you really know what you're doing,
and none of us yet has a shred of a clue, excerpt maybe some of
our immortal beloved poets, playwrights, and musetorn composers.
Bottom Line. There is no _|_ line, silly.
To be continued ...
Jon Awbrey
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