Hi all.

I agree. That was a fundamental disservice to Prolog. I could get a job at the time with this skill I had mastered. It’s time it came back.

Simon

 

Dr Simon Polovina, Department of Computing, Sheffield Hallam University

Cantor Building, 153 Arundel St, Sheffield, UK S1 2NU

Web: www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-profiles/simon-polovina www.polovina.me.uk

 

From: John F Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2024 10:51 PM
To: ontolog-forum@googlegroups.com
Cc: CG <cg@lists.iccs-conference.org>
Subject: [CG] Re: [ontolog-forum] Future Systems of the Past (was OWL2+SWRL vs CL

 

Igor,

 

I'm glad that we agree on the value of Prolog.   The reason why Prolog failed to achieve much usage in the US was caused by a prominent AI author, who wrote a couple of books and was considered an authority.   His comment about Prolog:  "We tried that with Microplanner, and it was inefficient."

 

Since it's not nice to say anything bad about the dead, I won't mention his name.  But his comment was based on a profound ignorance:  Microplanner was a research project, written by one person for a PhD dissertation.   It did not support the full functionality of Prolog.  It was written in LISP, which is OK for AI applications, but it is not efficient for high performance. 

 

For the IBM system that beat the world champion in Jeopardy, the program that analyzed the English questions and answers was written in Prolog.  That program was written by Michael McCord, who was one of the four co-authors of the book Knowledge Systems and Prolog.  My "Prolog to Prolog" was another one of the four.

 

By the way, the IBM developers had tried to use some software based on the Semantic Web stack.  But it was too slow and too difficult to update.  They brought back McCord, who had retired from IBM a few years earlier.  His Prolog implementation was faster, had more functionality, and was easier to update.

 

For our VivoMind company, we used Prolog for supporting applications that processed English and other natural languages.  The semantic representation was based on conceptual graphs, which are based on Peirce's existential graphs, which we extended (with a few minor features) to represent the full ISO standard for Common Logic.

 

The users communicated with applications in English and in diagrams.,  See the examples in https://jfsowa.com/talks/cogmem.pdf .   The VivoMind system could analyze English (and other NLs) as well as computer languages.  For the application in legacy reengineering, it was able to compare and detect errors and inconsistencies  in programming languages, English comments in the code, documentation about the programs, and various memos, commentary, and publications.

 

Our new Permion.ai company has a more general foundation that can also support current versions of LLMs.  That enables detailed analysis, evaluation, and correction of output generated by the LLMs.   Detecting errors is very important.  Correcting errors is even better.   

 

 And by the way, John McCarthy, who originally designed LISP, finally admitted that Prolog was better for advanced AI applications.  My colleague Arun Majumdar influenced that decision after showing him VivoMind applications and their implementation.

 

John

 

 

From: "Igor Toujilov' via ontolog-forum" <ontolog-forum@googlegroups.com>

 

John,

A typical scenario of consuming an ontology by end-users is the following:

- Download the ontology;

- Load it into a visual tool;

- Run a reasoner on it and see the results in the visual tool.

 

SWI-Prolog is an excellent system with web-server components and OWL support. I used it in 2005 when I was working in UCL for the Cancergrid project in ontologies in cancer bioinformatics. This was a big international project where I collaborated with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, UCLA, etc. I created an ontology web-server based on SWI-Prolog. It loaded ontologies, e.g. NCI Thesaurus, from OWL files into the Prolog runtime environment and then exposed the ontology through the web. The server accepted queries in Prolog and I suggested using it as a production server for the project. However, after some testing my suggestion was not accepted. The reason for this decision: software engineers who tested the server were not good enough in Prolog to write the queries.

 

Igor