my notes from 8/19/03 JC telecon

From: Benjamin Grosof (bgrosof@mit.edu)
Date: 08/19/03

  • Next message: Mike Dean: "bNode rule tests"
    Hi folks,
    Here are my notes from today's call.  The discussion was pretty hot and 
    heavy and I only captured a pretty summary version.
    Benjamin
    
    % notes from JC telecon 8/19/03
    % by Benjamin Grosof
    
    agenda:
    
    o news of various kinds
    
    o more discussion of Peter and Ian proposal on OWL-ish Rules
    
    participants:
    Mike Dean
    Benjamin Grosof
    Peter Patel-Schneider
    Harold Boley
    Said Tabet
    Ian Horrocks
    Sandro Hawke
    Deborah McGuinness
    Pat Hayes
    ? perhaps one or two others
    
    
    announcements:
    
    o Sandro and Mike:
    OWL has gone to candidate recommendation status as of today!
    
    o Benj:
    nonmon inheritance seems an important requirement for service descriptions
    and semantic web knowledge to support that, e.g.,
    - see my recent paper
    - recent SWSI Language Committee discussions
    
    o IJCAI report by Ian:
    
    not very interesting place,
    difficult to get to, lots of lost luggage
    50% got Montezuma's revenge the second day
    
    disappointingly light in substance on Semantic Web, tho' SW was mentioned
    a lot as related
    
    didn't attend workshops
    
    structure of the conf:  lots of invited talks this time, good in themselves
    but drained some energy from the technical sessions
    
    invited talk by Mehran Sahami of Google (formerly of Stanford) on directions
    for Web search:
    didn't mention SW at all in main, was mainly on standard IR stuff; his
    A to Q at end about SW was basically non-committal in wait-and-see spirit,
    partly since there's not a lot of markup, wasn't terribly encouraging, but...
    did invite folks to come to Google with ideas, they seem pretty open to it
    - Benj:  I know Mehran, his background is more learning than logic-y
    - Deborah:  another contact at Google is Peter Norvig
    
    Deborah Q:  what about SW for query expansion?
    A:  didn't get asked
    
    they bought
    Applied Semantics, co with big linguistics-oriented ontology (Wordnet-y),
    which did/do placements of ads by words on search engines
    - perhaps to hurt Google's competitor Overture
    
    Alon Halevy and Craig Knoblock and some other invited talks on data
    integration mentioned SW but didn't really give substance on
    connection to that
    
    session on AI and Internet (Ian didn't attend)
    
    several DL sessions on supporting technologies
    - nice paper by Franz Baader on tractable alg for expressive subset with
    conjunction and existentials and some cyclic definitions;
    some large ontologies (e.g., _____ [? Snomed ?]) actually fall in this subset
    - some papers on role inclusion axioms and keys
    - papers by Heiner ___ and ___ on
    reasoning about multiple distributed ontologies on the web;
    still preliminary
    
    %%%
    
    More discussion of Peter and Ian proposal on OWL-ish Rules:
    
    discussion around RDF and OWL-Full expressiveness -- Pat msg (under
    name of "Brandon Amundson") from earlier today
    
    discussion around bnodes and existentials
    - Benj:  worried about extensibility to LP not just FOL, thus want to
    stay Horn; to represent bnodes as existentials is problematic,
    so should give up either binary or Datalog or Horn;
    
    discussion around whether or not in Rules Lite to go for something in the
    expressive intersection between FOL and LP, thus extensible to it
    - a split among the group in this regard, when considering the combined
    {OWL ontologies + rules} KR's expressiveness:
      . some want {(all of OWL-DL+ + Horn}
      . some want {DLP + Horn}
    
    one approach:  permit the rules to be Horn, or reducible to Horn,
    even if when combined with OWL-DL
    
    suggestion/plan:  by early Sept., someone make a new iteration of
    proposal for LP-based onto + rules
    
    
    
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Prof. Benjamin Grosof
    Web Technologies for E-Commerce, Business Policies, E-Contracting, Rules, 
    XML, Agents, Semantic Web Services
    MIT Sloan School of Management, Information Technology group
    http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof or http://www.mit.edu/~bgrosof
    
    



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