Working backwards on the Semantic Web

I just had a bit of an insight: I think that many people, including myself, may be taking the wrong approach to working on the Semantic Web. I think that dealing with XML serializations of RDF, RDFS, and OWL is just plain wrong. Tools like Protege offer a frame-like UI that makes it a lot easier to work with (and free descriptive logic engines like Fact++ help by checking for consistencies). However...

I have had a little free time today to work on a pet project that Obie inspired: write Ruby wrapper code for making it easier to deal with RDF/RDFS/OWL by loading files and automatically mirroring classes, etc. I would work in Protege, then write Ruby code to consume the RDF/RDFS/OWL files so that I could work in a decent language. OK, fine.

However, this all still seems more than a little wrong to me. Since the Semantic Web is largely about ontologies and knowledge representation, why turn our backs on decades of AI research? Why not work with knowledge representation systems written in Lisp (or Prolog, Ruby, etc.) and have a back end that serializes to XML/RDF/RDFS/OWL as required. Really, use the best notation possible for all of the human-intensive work.

While Protege is a terrific tool, I still think that using older technologies like KEE, Loom, PowerLoom, etc. with optimal programming environments makes a lot of sense. Any language with good introspection (like Ruby or Common Lisp) would work for supporting XML serialization when required.

Comments

  1. Unknown11:29 AM

    I really like Protege, but I have to agree with your comments about building the knowledge representation directly in Lisp or Ruby and then communicating this in terms of rdf/rdfs/owl. I have tried a number of the plugins for reasoning/scripting, and they don't really offer a seamless and dynamic environment like you would have in Lisp/Ruby. Protege's first generation was originally implemented on a Symbolics. You can see the parallels to the MOP in the system classes and also the parallel to presentation types in the forms interface. Take a look at SWCLOS (http://iswc2004.semanticweb.org/demos/32/) it extends the CLOS MOP to do OWL.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant11:34 AM

    Hello Author,

    I have played with SWCLOS - pretty neat work.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more