Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Catching the Dreams 

Catching the Dreams
"If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, ely to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality.

There are many visions of the semantic web, some of them more interesting, some more likely to make money, some more likely to happen in the near future. The excitement of these visions has attracted many people to the concept from a variety of different intellectual backgrounds - databases, logic programming, AI knowledge representation, description logics and programming languages, among others. The result is that there have been many different forces pulling the language designs in different directions.

On the whole, the description logics seem to be winning. OIL - arguably the first proposed web-based standard - and DAML are essentially the same language written in different syntactic forms, and they are both quintessential description logics. Now, description logics - DLs - have some very fine features. They can be seen as a kind of hybrid of industrial-strength data modelling tools with a limited form of conventional logics, located at a particularly nice place on the trade-off curve slung between the extremes of a highly expressive - but computationally intractable - full logic, and a highly efficient - but almost autistic - database notation. DLs have become a standard tool for professional ontology builders in industrial and commercial settings."

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