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Re: Issues with XML and Semantic Web ?

• To: Irene Polikoff <irene@t...>
• Subject: Re: Issues with XML and Semantic Web ?
• From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
• Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:30:38 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
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• Reply-to: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 15:09:19 -0500, Irene Polikoff
<irene@t...> wrote:

> 
> In theory, the modularity of ontology models should provide the flexibility
> needed to accommodate different contexts. One could also only reference/use
> part of an ontology - parts one can "agree with" - without committing to the
> entire ontology. In practice, we are still figuring out how this will all
> work.

Forgive me if this is something I should have learned in SemWeb 101,
but doesn't any inferencing mechanism based on logic assume that the
ontologies are consistent?  How does one ensure that the parts of
multiple ontologies that one "agrees with" are consistent with one
another?  And if they're not, an inferencer could come to any
conclusion whatsoever (e.g. the possibly apocryphal story of Bertrand
Russell proving that he is the Pope from the premise that 2+2=5) ...
or what am I missing here?

In practice, what DOES one do, other than work with simple and unitary
ontologies that don't imply anything remotely interesting, but let
software agents automate the grunt work of generating queries,
transformations, etc. that are just too tedious for humans to do
quickly and accurately.  That's use case for the semantic web
technologies that I can both grok and see an application for, FWIW.

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    • From: Irene Polikoff <irene@t...>

• References:
  • RE: Issues with XML and Semantic Web ?
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
  • RE: Issues with XML and Semantic Web ?
    • From: Irene Polikoff <irene@t...>

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