Re: Some references about ontology and analogy
I received an offline response to my note by someone who
liked the references, but who disagreed with my comparison
of the Semantic Web to Cyc:
> ... bracketing of SemWeb approaches with Cyc just doesn’t
> make sense - they’re very different. A completely different
> set of factors will determine how well the former does...
It's true that Cyc started long before the SemWeb, but its
target customers and applications were *identical*. The
only difference is that Cyc had a head start, developed
the technology much further, and demonstrated failure (at
least a failure to be commercially successful) much sooner.
And by the way, I had once had high hopes for Cyc. When I
was at IBM, I had recommended that IBM join the group of Cyc
sponsors. The reply I got was that the management at IBM
research felt that they had better uses for a half million
dollars per year. In retrospect, I can't blame them.
If anyone disagrees, please look at the slides, including
the discussion of the ANSI/SPARC conceptual schema of 1978,
which was intended to support interoperability among multiple
applications by defining a common ontology (which was then
called a "conceptual schema"). There is absolutely *nothing*
being done today with ontologies and with languages such as
RDF, OWL, and SWRL that has not been tried in much greater
depth and sophistication over the past 20 or 30 years:
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/challenge.pdf
Everything that is being proposed today for the semantic web
is already implemented in Cyc. Just look at the slides:
an ontology of 600,000 concept types, over two million axioms,
and six thousand microtheories (i.e., specialized subdomains).
From the very beginning, the Cyc technology was made available
to major universities and corporate research centers, including
companies like Bellcore, Eastman Kodak, Microsoft, and the major
gov't and military agencies around the Beltway. I used to say
that *nobody* was able to develop any commercially successful
applications. I have recently been corrected by someone who
mentioned a couple of small applications, none of which were
sufficient to keep Cyc from major "downsizing".
Looking at what is being done today, I see much more funding
being poured into the SemWeb on technology whose only difference
from Cyc is that (a) it's much less developed, (b) it uses a
much clumsier notation, and (c) it has many more monkeys typing
randomly at many more typewriters.
In my opinion, the proposed goals and applications of Cyc include
everything proposed for the SemWeb as a subset. If anyone can
show anything about the SemWeb that suggests a greater chance for
success than Cyc, I would love to hear it. And for that matter,
if anyone can suggest a way of using Cyc to help make the SemWeb
successful, I would also love to hear that.
John Sowa