Re: [xtm-wg] For a general formalism of the semantic web - for more patient and formal work

["Bernard Vatant" <universimmedia@wanadoo.fr>]

Since we are in the "Big Picture" debate I'd like to add a little historical
perspective to Jean's intervention.

What computers' people call "interoperability" is called in other older
fields of science : "unification".
The first known unification happened in Physics when Newton proposed an
unique frame for terrestrial and celestial movements.
What is generally stressed about that is that he was the first one to have
the idea that they could be unified, against all previous prevailing
paradigms. What is less stressed but surely as important, and IMO even more,
is that he forged a new mathematical tool - now called calculus - to do
that. Without that formal mathematical new tool, the idea would have
remained just a brilliant idea.

This very tool turned out to be very powerful indeed, since it was used to
unify afterwards in 19th century electromagnetism and thermodynamics. If you
know what is a differential, you can understand mechanics and
electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Computer Science is very young compared with Physics. It has developed in a
great variety of ways, and mainly around specific technologies and ad hoc
languages. It now calls for unification. Topic Maps are a good conceptual
step towards that. So is XML, and RDF etc ... My hunch is that, like in
Physics, unification will be gained through some federating mathematical
tools, and first in line of these candidate tools is the Graph Theory. Maybe
markup people around there don't care much for getting involved in graph
theory, no more than some graph mathematicians care much about XML - but
both of them should indeed care. One thing is sure : graph theory is the
older one, and is here to stay. Not sure any present syntax will still be
around in 2020. But graph models will still be there.

A last thing : unification was never easy for anybody. People had to strive
and learn these new tools. But they were damned worth it in the long run!
Do you think Newton should have stopped war with Leibniz about calculus,
saying "well, forget it, there will never be more than a few dozen people
understanding that stuff anyway". That was about the number of people
understanding what it was at the time. Now it's used dayly by maybe over a
million scientists and technicians and engineers all over the world.
And I think in terms of productivity, gathering energy around graph theory,
and graph processing, and graph representation, and graph query etc, will be
much more rewarding than building one new syntax every other six months, and
then struggling to interoperate the syntax, and getting to endless wars on
the MySyntaxIsBetterThanYours battlefield ...

Have a nice day

 <ondutyepistemologist> Bernard </ondutyepistemologist>

----- Message d'origine -----
De : "jean delahousse" <jean.delahousse@mondeca.com>
À : <xtm-wg@yahoogroups.com>
Envoyé : jeudi 22 mars 2001 23:27
Objet : RE: [xtm-wg] For a general formalism of the semantic web - for more
patient and formal work


> Dear all,
>
> reading you all, here are my thoughts :
>
> 1) people have been working for five years or more on topic maps and it is
> still very difficult to find a PM that is formal and clear -> so I guess
it
> is time to explore new ways to formalize the PM
>
> 2) Ten years ago network and telco people had a lot of problems to
> formalize, analyze and manipulate representation of telecom and computers
> networks : they have been working since with graph theory people and most
of
> their tools comes from there (as example : see the ILOG component to
> visualize network, see clustering algorithm...)
>
> 3) A PM is a way to process something, before to do that I think it is
> useful to have a formalization of what we manipulate, then it will be a
lot
> easier to write PM
>
> 4) all specifications of the semantic web manipulates the same kind of
basic
> objects. Each specification has specialized some objects for their
specific
> need (ontology, index, complex document set...) and create their own
syntax
> to describe those objects - some organize the objects as tree (most of the
> document DTD describes tree organization), other as non hierarchical graph
> (RDF, XTM)...
>
> 5) at the final stage of semantic web processing the XML documents that
will
> be manipulate for query, filtering, clustering, indexing... will be a set
of
> linked documents coming from various authoring tools (OIL, TM, News ML...)
> It will be difficult to say to the process to stop because it reach a
> document conform to a different specification than the XTM
specification...
>
> 6) When we make specification for "pure" XTM authoring tools we don't have
> to worry to much about this other semantic web specification and it seems
> that the actual XTM specifications are clear enough to let the development
> teams write authoring tools for XTM
>
> 7) When we worry about how to process the result of the authoring tool
which
> is large XML documents (XTM) links to other XML documents (RDF, News
ML)...
> (by process I mean navigate, filter, query, ....)then we have to worry
about
> a general network of information with semantic to organize it.
>
> 8) Execpt if we think (the XTM community) a "XTM semantic web" separated
> from the "general semantic web" will exist, we have to think PM in a
larger
> way
>
> 9) I don't mean there is not specific issue processing a TM (as it has a
> complex and rich structure) - I mean that it is important to have a basic
> formalism to talk about the basic components of the semantic web, shared
by
> all the specifications. Starting from that common vocabulary and formalism
> each spefication will  specialize this vocabulary for it own needs and
then
> try to explain the specific constrain about processing a document conform
to
> their DTD.
>
> 10) will then have a semantic web PM for any XML document and advance
> features of the PM to process a RDF document or a XTM document.
>
> 11) the process may seem a little to long to some of us but I think it is
> worth doing it and that a project as ambitious and great as the semantic
web
> is worth spending some more time and gathering new kind of expertise (IA,
> Math, Cartography..) to get out of this complex "soup" of specification
> based only on syntax.
>
> 12) I see a lot of argument against a formal description using the concept
> of graph theory that say : I will not understand it, so I will  not use
it,
> so it is not useful.
> The argument is very weak as the issue is not to know if some of us will
> have difficulties to understand the formalism (today some people can
> understand TM concept but don't understand DTD ) but to know if it is "the
> good formalism". For my part I think most of the processing of semantic
web
> will be quite complex and that most of the tools will be understood only
by
> the specialist of different fields.
>
>
> Sincery
>
> jean delahousse
> www.mondeca.com




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