Re: good references re. ontologies for S*m*ntic W*b
Cathy,
I'd like to endorse the articles that John Bateman
et al. wrote and are writing:
http://134.102.58.154/i1/deliverables.htm
I don't believe that it is possible to draw any
distinction between semantics in general and semantics
for the Semantic Web in particular. I agree with John's
remarks:
JB> The first two listed are ontology surveys, but
> *not* for the semantic web particularly: that is why
> I am interested if these would all be automatically
> excluded from your list or not. If first order
> axiomatisation is sufficient to exclude consideration
> for the semantic web, then I reckon that is a bit
> premature (with the convergence of first order reasoners
> and description logic reasoners in terms of performance
> that we are currently seeing for restricted areas).
> But if not, then what other criteria would you select
> to distinguish a "semantic web" ontology.
The Semantic Web started with RDF, then OWL, and now SWRL.
Each one is getting more expressive, and to predict the
trends, I would suggest a comparison with Cyc. The first
representation for Cyc (as documented by Lenat and Guha in
their 1990 book) was based on frames. But as they continued,
they kept adding more features until they got a very expressive
version of logic that includes all of FOL plus metalevels,
contexts, and nomonotonic reasoning.
Lenat always said that nothing was ever added to Cyc unless
it was absolutely necessary for the applications. Since all
documents and applications eventually make their way to the
WWW, there is no aspect of semantics that would not be needed
for the Semantic Web.
For your bibliography, following are a couple of my papers.
The first is a survey article that was widely cited by
people working on the Semantic Web:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/ontometa.htm
Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics
The second is a cautionary tale about the knowledge soup
and the problems and pitfalls it involves:
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/challenge.pdf
The Challenge of Knowledge Soup
This talk raises some troublesome questions that any attempt
to do anything about semantics must address. It is not
possible to get past the difficulties without recognizing
them and either solving them or finding ways of working
around them. Ignoring them can only lead to disaster.
John Sowa