Message 12488 of the SUO list

Subject: Re: Enhancing Data Interoperability with Ontologies...
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:43:12 +1000
From: Philippe Martin
In-reply-to: msg12486 by John Sowa


> Following is a paper by Philippe Martin that compares various
> forms, including his version of Formalized English:
> 
>     http://www.webkb.org/doc/recommendations.html

Actually, http://www.webkb.org/doc/model/comparisons.html is the document
where I compared my notations with KIF and RDF+OWL (and to a small extent,
UML; CGIF and CGLF are treated elsewhere) according to the usual knowledge 
representation features: contexts, sets, numerical quantifiers, definitions,
etc. I'd like to extend this comparison to other notations (especially 
those that are expressive, high-level and not XML-based). So please do not
hesitate to send me the translations of my examples in your favourite 
notation (and URLs for the language and your home page so that I can
acknowledge the source of each new translation).

The above URL given by John Sowa is about conventions to permit knowledge
sharing. One of the rationales for my languages is to lead their users
to follow common knowledge sharing conventions, thus increasing knowledge
sharing possibilities (e.g. to improve knowledge inferencing and automatic
translation). This is not at all the case with low-level languages such as
KIF and RDF+OWL.
As conventions do influence the way ontologies are built (and how knowledge
is represented), I think this is an important point not currently treated
by the SUO. Three weeks ago, I tried to start the discussion by giving a URL
for the above document (http://www.webkb.org/doc/recommendations.html) but
there was no follow-up. Let me take this opportunity to ask again for
comments (for or against conventions in general, and those I discussed).

Philippe