Paul A Houle wrote:
On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Kingsley Idehen
<kide...@openlinksw.com <mailto:kide...@openlinksw.com>> wrote:
Schema Last vs. Schema First :-) An RDF virtue that once broadly
understood, across the more traditional DBMS realms, will work
wonders for RDF based Linked Data appreciation.
That's the conclusion that I'm coming to.
I've been think of the question of, "what would Cyc look like if it
were started today?"
Cyc took the "Schema First" approach to the human memome project: as
a result it put a lot of work into upper and middle ontologies which
don't seem all that useful to many observers. Despite a great deal of
effort put into avoiding 'representational thorns', it got caught up.
A modern approach would be to start with a huge amount of data over
various domains and to construct schemas using a mix of statistical
inference and human input. The role of the upper ontology would be
reduced here, because, in general, it isn't always necessary to
mesh up two randomly chosen domains, say: "bus schedules",
"anime", "psychoanalysis", "particle physics"
Now, somebody might want to apply the system to study the
relationship of "anime" with "psychoanalysis"; that could be
approached by constructing a metatheory (i) based on those particular
domains, and (ii) conditioned by the application that the system is
being put to, that is, "on the bit", connected via a feedback loop
to some means of evaluating the system's motion towards a goal.
"Representational Thorns" get bypassed here because the system is free
to develop a new representation if an old one fails for a particular task.
Yes!
Recent SUMO, Wordnet, Yago, and DBpedia mapping also provides another
mechanism for demonstrating all of this.
Basically, SUMO, OpenCyc, UMBEL, Yago etc.. remain strange second-class
citizens of interest re. LOD, but in due course this will change, since
without these compliments, the real power of Linked Data will remain
mercurial across all practical dimensions.
Linked Data does provide both substrate and exploitation mechanism for
ubiquitous smart data.
Note to all: you cannot have ubiquitous smart data without an ability to
deal with context fluidity; someone will always have a different point
of view, and that should be an acceptable part of the deal re. Linked
Data driven metadata :-)
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
