SUO: Re: Enhancing Data Interoperability with Ontologies...
Danny,
That depends on how you define the semantic web:
DA> It's adequacy depends on the purposes to which
> it's applied - so far it looks adequate for
> Semantic Web purposes.
If you limit the semantics of the semantic web to
what can be done with OWL, then that's a tautology.
But as that paper explained, OWL does not support
units and measures. And other people are for more.
As Scott McNealy has been saying for years, the
network is the computer. The reverse is also
true: there should be no distinction between web
applications and computer applications of any kind.
In other words, the same semantics that supports
the execution must also support the presentation.
That means that the semantics must support everything
that can be specified in SQL, UML, Petri nets, and
other declarative languages. You can express all
that semantics in logic, and you can express all
that logic in controlled natural languages.
DA> ... I await your examples which show how CGs
> can be used to carry out syntactic translations
> on XML formats better than XSLT.
I agree that the web must be supported: that means
there must be support for URIs and HTML and XML
formats. Languages such as Java, Perl, Python, PHP,
and Javascript (or ECMAscript) do that very nicely.
For declarative languages, I recommend controlled
natural languages, which would interact with the
XML files in a way that is similar to the procedural
languages above. For all declarative information,
systems analysts, web designers, and application
programmers should be able to use controlled NLs,
with diagrams such as UML for visual supplements,
and with logic as the internal representation (in
notations such as CGs, KIF, predicate calculus,
or even SQL).
DA> btw, I've seen plenty of argument from the other
> end of scale, web developers and XML people saying
> that the RDF model is far too complex, and ontologies
> absolutely unnecessary.
I certainly agree that RDF is "far too complex".
I would recommend controlled English as a replacement.
As for "ontology", I would prefer to get rid of that
word altogether because it has caused far more confusion
than progress. The information that is contained in UML
diagrams and SQL constraints is a superset of the kind
of information that people are encoding in OWL.
I would propose controlled NLs for all of it. And I
wouldn't even tell people that what they were saying
is either logic or ontology. I'd just tell them it's
English -- or French, German, Italian, Japanese, etc.
John