Re: SUO: OMG, UML and Ontologies
Pat,
At 06:50 PM 2/28/2001 -0600, pat hayes wrote:
> Adam Pease <apease@ks.teknowledge.com>:
>>Francis,
>> I'm not sure where our disagreement lies then. Maybe in fact we
>> agree. Let me try to restate some points which I believe are tied together.
>>
>>1. Logical languages like KIF are very expressive and ensure that we can
>>define precisely the semantics of the terms on our ontology.
>>
>>2. Logical languages like KIF can be translated easily into less
>>expressive forms such as XML or UML.
>
>Er...that isnt quite true. These less expressive forms can be translated
>into KIF, but not (in general) the reverse. What is true is that anything
>that can be said in UML (etc.) can be said in KIF, or automatically
>translated into KIF.
I was speaking too casually. You're exactly right, of course. As a
practical matter though, folks who like "frame" representations will be
happy with the (diminished) translated result since if they liked axioms
they'd be happy with KIF.
>XML isnt really in the same league since it has no semantics: it is really
>only a notation for arbitrary labelled directed graph structures. KIF can
>be directly rendered into XML-compliant syntax in several ways, of which
>the most obvious is to replace each pair of nested ( ) brackets with XML
>start and end tags <....> </...> labelled with the syntactic class of the
>KIF expression. <Metacomment> Why anyone would actually prefer this
>barbaric clumsiness is beyond my comprehension, but apparently many people
>do. Perhaps their heads don't have enough capacity to maintain a pushdown
>stack? </Metacomment> I believe there is a standardisation effort under
>way right now to settle on a generally useful such notational convention
>for XML-KIF.
>
>>3. Many people are not familiar with KIF and so they should be able to
>>work with the SUO in a language in which they feel comfortable.
>
>The very real problems the SUO faces will not be made any easier or more
>difficult by the choice of notation, which should be a minor matter that
>we could profitably ignore on this listing. As you know, Adam (having done
>a good deal of it yourself :-) there is a great deal of work now in hand
>on translations between alternative notations, most of which can be done
>mechanically.
I agree, but folks tend to feel very tied to their particular
representations, and when they're not familiar with someone else's, they
worry about whether it will meet their needs.
Adam
>Pat Hayes
>
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