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Re: Re: A modest conception of the Semantic Web

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Re: A modest conception of the Semantic Web
• From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
• Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 00:24:39 -0400
• References: <200205110312.g4B3Cjm16425@l...>

[Uche Ogbuji]

> I'm sure many of the rdf-logic folks came about this insight through
rigorous training, but it came to me in a client project.  When we started
developing the ontology in the Sun project I've described here recently, I
thought we were going to need some heavyweight business rules coding.  In
fact, we at Fourthought had already developed RDF Inference Language (RIL)
as basically an expert systems shell for RDF, in order to implement such
knowledgebases.
>
> I was amazed as we proceeded in design and analysis that pretty much all
the business rules could be couched as classification problems.  In the end,
it turned out that DAML+OIL plus a solid query language (for which we used
Versa) was all we needed for such business rules (we've since abandoned the
inference part of RIL), and it was all declarative.  It turns out that this
is one of the most flexible designs I've ever been involved in, and I've
come to understand some of the promise of WebOnt at least in closed systems.
I will watch with interest as distributed ontologies come into play: ours
was highly centralized, so we could manage performance and other matters
closely.
>
> Certainly I have become a believer in the fundamental soundness of this
approach.
>

Uche, could you give one or two more concrete examples of this (I mean,
examples of replacing rules and inference by declarations and class
analyses)?  Especially something that gives the flavor of what surprised
you.  Not of course something that you shouldn't be talking about, but some
kind of illustration.  It would be very useful to me and, I'm sure, many
others.

Thanks,

Tom P

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