Ravi, Michael, List,
Ravi: I think of myself as a student of this amazing concept of Ontology which most in the west have learned from Aristotle and Greeks.
So do I. In fact, Aristotle and the Stoics specified an excellent replacement for OWL. Aristotle organized his categories in a hierarchy that can be represented by the hierarchy part of OWL (the best and most useful part of OWL). The four sentence types for his logic (A, I, E, O) specify the operations for reasoning with and about the hierarchy.
Then the Stoics specified if-then rules for stating constraints and performing inferences with and about the hierarchy and related information. Although they didn't have full FOL, their if-then rules were later extended to full FOL by the medieval logicians. Ockham had specified full FOL in the 14th century, but stated in a version of Latin.
That combination would have been equivalent to KL-ONE (by Brachman and Fikes in 1973). They coined the term T-Box (Terminology box) for the hierarchy and A-Box (Assertion box) for the equivalent of FOL. Since they did not restrict their specifications by decidability, their T-Box plus A-Box would be equivalent to "good OWL" -- i.e. OWL without the limitations of decidability. Unfortunately, Brachman later listened to the decidability gang who inflicted decidabilit . That was a major step backward from the middle ages.
The following point is fundamental to knowledge representation of any kind, especially applications of ontology:
Michael DB: The main point I was trying to make in the meeting is IMO right now there is a large disparity between the ML people and the Semantic side and my impression is the ML people barely know we still exist. I don't know how to address that but I think it is worth thinking about some potential joint work with ML leaders like Ng and people from Ontolog in the future.
One of the great strengths of Ontolog Forum is an issue that many (most?) theoreticians ignore: How do you use logic to do anything useful? Many excellent theoreticians don't have any experience in practical applications.
I admit that was my outlook when I was studying math & logic. But at IBM, my first job was in a mathematical analysis group, where we had to solve problems for which the engineers didn't have the training. So I had to learn a great deal about their problems and about practical computational methods for solving them. That was excellent on-the-job training for which I had to educate myself.
Michael: I think it is worth thinking about some potential joint work with ML leaders like Ng and people from Ontolog in the future.
But it's important to recognize the goals and interests of any people you invite. You may have learned a great deal about linguistics by talking with Chomsky. But it's unlikely that Chomsky would take much interest in studying any problems you may have. (I know quite a few people who have been badly bruised or burned by Chomsky because they dared to modify his theories in order to deal with practical problems.)
Re Andrew Ng: I have read some of his writings, and I agree that they're good. But as you said in your note, "the ML people barely know we [ontologists] still exist. I don't know how to address that."
They discuss the issues and some of the historical developments. Looking backwards from today, I would summarize the issues in three parts:
1. An ontology specified as a hierarchy (tree or lattice). This would correspond to Aristotle's hierarchy with his four rules for specifying and reasoning with and about it. It would also correspond to the T-box.
2. Constraints on the hierarchy specified in full FOL instead of the subset in OWL specified by Turtle or other notations.
3. Assertions in a database of SQL, object-oriented DB, or RDF assertions anywhere on the WWW.
Then add the constraint that #1 has priority over #2 in case of any contradictions, and #2 would have priority over assertions in #3 that come from a DB (SQL or object-oriented). For assertions that come from anywhere else, there may be good reasons for giving them higher priority, but that would depend on the sources and the circumstances.
John
From: "Michael DeBellis" <mdebellissf@gmail.com>
What message do you think ANdrew Ng would give to our summit in a paragraph?
Ravi, I honestly don't know. There have been a couple presentations where I thought that semantic technology was highly relevant to what he was talking about. One of them was on improving ML systems by better training data. He spent a lot of time talking about the point that the best way to increase the accuracy of an ML system was not just increasing the amount of the data but increasing the quality of the data. That was a topic where I thought Semantic technology could be especially relevant in many ways. Defining data integrity constraints with SHACL and throwing out data that violates those constraints as well as using OWL models to better understand the data and using the ontology to evaluate specific elements (i.e., instances in a knowledge graph) to again determine if certain examples are probably the result of errors. Also, do identify trends in the data that might help provide better structure to the ML models. I've thought about reaching out to professor Ng. In the past I've done that with a few well known academics like Chomsky and I usually get very favorable responses. Several years ago I had some amazing detailed discussions with Chomsky about issues related to ethics, linguistics, and theory of mind. But Ng is very much in demand by various businesses as well as being a respected academic and my feeling is he probably gets swamped with so many random emails from undergrads learning ML that he's less likely to reply.
The main point I was trying to make in the meeting is IMO right now there is a large disparity between the ML people and the Semantic side and my impression is the ML people barely know we still exist. I don't know how to address that but I think it is worth thinking about some potential joint work with ML leaders like Ng and people from Ontolog in the future.
Michael
Micheal
Yes A couple of speakers did talk about specific roles and use of Agents, but including Fall series on LLMs and Ontologies and current Summit 2024, their mention has been not too often.
What message do you think ANdrew Ng would give to our summit in a paragraph?
I will try to look at the link as well.