Hi Michael, 2010-07-18 13:35 Michael Kohlhase <[email protected]>: > (*) OpenMath CDs can interoperate with the Semantic Web and OM can act as a > "Semantics Provider for the Maths on the Semantic Web". > > I consider this as an important goal for OpenMath, and am delighted with the > discussion.
thanks for stressing the "provider" role once more, that's indeed the most important motivation for all that. Recall that Linked Open Data is an (extremely successful) grassroots movement. But that means that linked data publishers are quick in creating new ontologies which [they think] suit their needs. So if we don't demonstrate them that we already have something well-designed that fits into their environment, something that is much less well-designed than OpenMath might become a de-facto standard, and once that has been "achieved", it will be much harder to get OpenMath into use cases such as statistical datasets published on the web. > However, from what I see, there seem to be three (largely independent) topics > concerning the OM/SemWeb integration that are discussed together that I would > like to tease apart for clarity > > 1. Extracting RDF from OpenMath CDs as a service for the Semantic Web > 2. Injecting objects from the Semantic Web into OpenMath > 3. The DLMF is possibly not Semantic-Web compliant. If we put (3) that way, it might actually rather be discussed on some DLMF mailing list, as the OpenMath community should only be concerned with the subtasks of * what things in DLMF to link to * and using which relation(s) > 1. If we can extract RDF from OCDs, then we have a way to meet (*). I > personally think that CLs last suggestion of adding *.rdf files to *.ocd > files (just like *.sts *.ntn, ...) is closest to the OpenMath tradition here. > I would suggest to open a new thread (or TRAC ticket) I will open such a ticket soon. > that concentrates on getting the right technically, That's the most important question for now. > how to author it, RDF/XML, which is the most awkward RDF encoding that exists, will be required for now, as it is both universally understood by RDF-based tools, and processable by XSLT. So I guess that for now I will be the only one maintaining these files. > and how to get a process going that will add this information for the CD set > we have so far. As we will now have these files separated from the *.ocd files, which are under the control of the CD editor, I guess that I can feel free to edit them, once a basic consensus has been found by discussing the questions of what OpenMath CD information to link to what external datasets (e.g. FMPs to DLMF equations), and what relations to use (but note that rdfs:seeAlso always works). (@James, please correct me if I'm wrong!) > I really think that the "auxiliary file" approach is the right one for OCD > here; all who like a more integrated approach can use what Christoph has > developed for OMDoc CDs, there is no need to make the two approaches > syntactically similar. > 2. If we can represent non-OM objects (e.g. math concepts from the DLMF) in > OpenMath, then we can use FMPs to represent properties of these (and in > particular relations to OCD-defined objects). This contradicts the previous paragraph on "auxiliary files". Michael, are you suggesting (1) and (2) as two alternatives to explore? After all the discussion we've had, I feel up to developing a proof of concept for (1), but I'm now skeptical about (2). > From these we could then generate RDF to achieve (*). This solution would > additionally open up the reasoning about non-OM objects in OpenMath tools and > thus would put OM on an equal footing with the Semantic Web, so we should > pursue it. I have to warn you once more that the semantic web community is not interested (or at least very hard to convince) in alternative encodings that claim to be better than RDF. Conversely, the OpenMath community may not be interested in dealing with arbitrary data from the semantic web. Consider SCIEnce, which I'd consider the state of the art in OpenMath-based web services. They completely ignore the URI nature of OpenMath symbols (at least I haven't read anything about CDBase in relation with SCIEnce), but that is not necessarily bad – they simply don't seem to need it to achieve their goals. But then, who would be interested in applying "OpenMath reasoners" (e.g. CASes) to RDF data from the semantic web? Those reasoners that could do something useful with these data are DL reasoners or certain rule engines, but they prefer RDF(S)/OWL/RIF/RuleML input over OpenMath. I used to be more enthusiastic about these things, but now I got more realistic :-/ (And if we want to be enthusiastic about it, there is still OMDoc.) > There seem to be two possible solutions to this on the table. > * CD-based: particular sets non-OM objects are reflected in special CDs > (e.g. for the DLMF objects a "dlmf" cd). > * Meta-CD-based: we develop a meta-CD that supplies a symbol that makes > an OM object out of a OMSTR argument. > > The second one seems more general to me, since we can always make > special-case CDs that use OM relations on OMSTR-based objects. I'd also support the second one – something like Paul's suggestion. Still I'm not sure whether it would be _useful_. Cheers, Christoph -- Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701 _______________________________________________ Om mailing list [email protected] http://openmath.org/mailman/listinfo/om
