RE: SUO: RE: Topic Maps
>Dear John,
>
>You completely miss the point. This is not an issue of KIF or Topic Maps.
>Topic Maps only provides a structuring and linking capability - precisely
>what KIF doesn't have.
What "structuring capability" is provided in ISO/IEC 13250 ? See for
example http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/sc34/document/8/draft27.pdf
>There are two points:
>
>1. Topic Maps can help us to organise our KIF theories - manage the network
>for us. All we get with KIF is something monolithic.
I fail to see quite how topic maps are going to do this managing, or
even help in doing it. They seem to be a purely hyper-textual device,
for organizing textual resources. Being based on a primitive notion
of 'association link' (it is a pity that the ISO committee didn't
have a psychologist on board, who could have explained the 30-odd
years of frustration into which cognitive psychology was led by
relying on association networks) they aren't going to be able to
express much useful logical structure. So even with the ISO
impimateur, I doubt if Topic Maps are likely to be very much real use.
I think a much more productive direction to go in would be to
reconcile KIF with the emerging web-based semantic markup languages,
notably DAML+OIL, which provide both a way to use URIs as an
organizing tool to connect ontologies on the web and could be fully
integrated into the logic itself. There already is an axiomatic
semantics for DAML+OIL written in KIF, for example.
>2. If we are going to get the SUO used, we need to make it easily
>accessible. We could aid this with the use of Topic Maps.
What is the user community for Topic Maps? KIF is already easily
accessible: there are many widely available software tools for
reasoning with it, translating into and out of it, and parsing it.
Several of these have been in wide use for about 10 years now, and it
can be written in XML if anyone feels they want to do that.
>What is being suggested has nothing to do with how the ontology is defined.
>There is an issue that KIF is unintelligible to all but a few cognoscenti,
Well, I do feel obligated to point out that KIF has been treated as a
kind of standard by almost everyone in the entire ontology research
community for about a decade, and is in any case only conventional
first-order logic written in (an admittedly somewhat messy) LISP-like
syntax, so this 'few cognoscenti' is rather a large percentage of the
world's active workers in this area.
Pat Hayes
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