Comments on: Rules are not enough. Knowledge is core to reuse.

By: paul@haleyAI.com

paul@haleyAI.com — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:45:56 +0000

Although rule interchange may be possible without a common semantics (i.e., syntactically), there is no future in it. Your ontological concern is reasonable and shared. However, Cyc and a rigorous ontology covering ACORD are tremendous assets. Your point about compatibility, consistency and mapping is a good one, although not specific to any vendor’s product.

There is no known, robust and reliable means of reconciling less rigorous ontologies (e.g., folksonomies). Until this theoretical problem is solved, reusing upper or standard ontologies is the way to go, no matter how large they need to be.

I think compatibility is less of an issue than mapping and that the need for consistency is greatly exaggerated. We need approaches to knowledge management and automation that are much more robust in the face of inconsistency. The onus and limitations of enforced consistency are simply too much in practice and in theory.

OWL and RIF are a great technical foundation. SBVR is right to emphasize vocabulary in addition to a lesser emphasis on OWL RIF functionality.

A BRMS that unifies SBVR OWL RIF, perhaps with deployment across CLIPS/JESS/Drools and PRR would be pretty handy.

By: snshor

snshor — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 03:04:45 +0000

Completely agree. It is impossible to share (interchange) rules without sharing (mapping?) domain ontology first. Still my concern is that underlying ontology is too complex or too large (look at Cyc or even at ACORD). The size of the ontology presents not only the computational but also the semantic challenge as well. Authority’s approach of building ontology from the linguistic rule presentation provides a good example of ad-hoc ontology building, I consider it to be the best “practical” tool for the purpose; still the issues of compatibility, consistency and ontology mapping were not (to the best of my knowledge, which could be somewhat limited and outdated) addressed properly, which could be attributed to resource limitations. This all brings to the fore the question of having all the major vendors to support w3c RDF/OWL ontology format + RIF and therefore “outsource” the ontology compatibility issue to more general community

By: paul@haleyAI.com

paul@haleyAI.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:44:04 +0000

More agreement. SBVR is not the solution but is good in that it addresses vocabulary, model, and logic (more than rules). Different meanings of customer can be problematic but less than people believe if the vocabulary references a semantic model that is distinct from implementation concerns. It turns out that the meaning of words like “customer” is usually disambiguated by its use within sentences. One customer may be used with one verb relating it to a second concept but a second kind of customer would use a different verb to relate it to a third concept. (These verbs label relations in the underlying ontology, BTW). It is rare for two distinct concepts to use the same verb to relate themselves to the same kind of concept by different relations.

Ruthlessly practical. I like that. This ruthlessness is an onus on the customer side but an opportunity for vendors.

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:27:03 +0000

Paul

As always you make interesting points and I think our differences are small overall. My focus is on decisions as the primary point of reuse precisely because rule or ruleset reuse, like code reuse, is hard. However the complexity of standards like SBVR and the difficulty of mapping them to actual operational systems should not be underestimated.

Reuse can occur at many levels and is valuable to different people at each of those levels. When companies cannot agree between divisions what a customer is, the idea that they can start by reusing a vocabulary may be a stretch. A ruthlessly practical focus on how systems can reuse things is one way to progress in the meantime.

JT
Author of Smart (enough) Systems