[topicmapmail] Conceptual Graphs are Step 6

[Jack Park]

Dan,

I think that there is a legitimate marriage between topic maps and more 
than one class of inferential structure. I personally don't think that 
raw XTM is particularly suited to inferencing, though Eric Freese has 
been showing some pretty slick stuff with XTM. I would like to think 
that there is some underlying representation scheme which, depending on 
the type of fetch or access, yields an XTM structure, a CG structure, 
plain old frames (POF), or whatever. Using PSIs in that structure 
satisfies the need for identity, no matter what the structure might look 
like.

I cannot escape the intuition that the TMRM, as I am watching it 
metamorphose from the gem of an idea hatched by Steve and his friends, 
to a structure suggestive of the, shall I say, canonical representation 
scheme about which I just spoke.

Recall that Doug Lenat was pretty much "frames all the way", until 
others got involved in Cyc, and then you got assertions, logical 
statements, and a dozen or more different kinds of inference engines,. 
If I had all the time in the world, and didn't have bills to pay, I'd go 
to my grave chasing this wild-assed belief that, with assertions, we can 
pretty much say whatever we want, and we can pretty much perform the 
inferences we want with what we just said, and we can have topic maps at 
the same time from the same effort.

TSC was originally just a rational reconstruction of Eurisko. Nothing 
more than that, except that, whilst it was a POF system, it also brought 
to bear the formalism of QP theory, which posits, in my own translation, 
actors, relations, and states, all tied together with process rules 
which roam about in episodes (akin to time slices of the history of some 
process), looking to fire and have side effects, making new episodes.

That's not unlike what you could do with conceptual graphs, and even 
topic maps, if you like. A process rule is like a template with unbound 
variables. You could have association templates in XTM; why not have XTM 
templates with unbound variables, looking to mate? It just seems that 
there may be a bazillion ways to crack this puppy.

Ultimately, I'd like to do all that with a constrained natural language. 
I built a template matcher for TSC and it got used by some kids to do 
science fair projects, was used in a high school biology class to let 
students query a QP knowledge base about immune responses to bacterial 
antigen, and my daughter, at age 7, used it to invent her own version of 
a taxonomy of living things. That turned out to be somewhat prophetic; 
she and her brother coauthored a chapter in _XML Topic Maps_ on the 
Linnean taxonomy as a topic map.

TSC was originally written in Forth on a Macintosh. System 6. Remember that?
TSC has recently been transliterated into Java and is slated to be open 
sourced when I finish the triple-store backside and the tuplespace 
server which it needs as an agenda manager in a distributed, 
seti-at-home-like environment. It needs to be distributed because I 
anticipate blooming enormous models of organisms when it is running.


That's what I think I know at this time in history. Your mileage may vary.
Cheers
Jack
ps: where are the references you cite below?

Dan Corwin wrote:

> Jack Park wrote:
>
>> Brief comment on framenet. I just did a quick scan of the site; it 
>> looked terribly familiar. I think it's the work of Charles Fillmore, 
>> who's early papers on case frames were referenced by Marvin Minsky in 
>> his original paper about Frame representation systems. I'd have to 
>> suspect that Fillmore's work predates most everything we presently 
>> know about AI representation schemes.
>
>
> Yep, he's the same guy.  Influential and well respected.
>
>> My partner in the program The Scholar's Companion, Dan Wood, took 
>> Fillmore's class and even implemented a case frame parser for 
>> constrained natural languages, early in 1989 when we were working on 
>> an SBIR project. There may be a lot to be learned from looking at the 
>> framenet papers.
>
>
> One key thing I learned from it: Fillmore no longer focuses on
> any fixed set of case frame role types - such as in [1].  So
> the roles - in [3] - remains pretty ad hoc for ovcer all the frames.
>
> I sense he is not just being lazy or sloppy, but feels the role types
> of [3] are actually sub-types of base types such as [1] (or his version
> of it), which with modest effort could each be added by overriding (in 
> the
> O-O sense) some primative's rules or data for constraints, etc.  WORDS 
> hopes
> to support that, so roles in [3] can be derived from those in [1].
>
>> There may also be tons of merit in just writing de novo software that 
>> behaves like CGs. That's what I did with qualitative process theory, 
>> and now I'm pretty sure that QP theory can be made to behave very 
>> much like CGs as well.
>
>
> I know nothing more of QP and TSC than what I was recently
> able to find from Google and your website, but I'm interested.
> Could you elaborate, and are they active as tools and/or R&D?
>
> Independently, please comment on my related reply to Murray
> below, which addresses a "logic" ontology for CGs.  Could it
> be used to feed TSC or QP with clause-like "facts" to evaluate?
>
> Regards,
> Dan Corwin
>
>
> * Murray Altheim wrote:
>
>>> Does [a wiki] sound like a reasonable plan of attack? The mailing list
>>> works okay, but ideas tend to get lost into the archives to easily.
>>
>
> Wiki space would indeed be nice, but ontologies A and B seem to me
> well documented, if not always in PSIs yet, at least with subject
> indicators like [1-3].
>
> The real need I see for more doc and dialog is on ontology C,
> and related topics like Jack started above:
>
> To wit: how can CGs - *or any other CLAUSE-like assertions* -
> best be packaged in XTM for processing by a remote logic engine?
>
> Being naive about such things, I'd guess from [2] that one really
> only needs to define these 9 types:
>
>   a "C-GRAPH" type, with ontology B's CLAUSE as one sub-type
>
>   the six other C-GRAPH sub-types defined in [2], including
>
>      AND, NOT -------------------- the *only* primatives
>      OR, IF-THEN ----------------- derived from AND & NOT
>      PROPOSITION, SITUATION ------ sets of nested C-GRAPHS
>
>   a type of Part-Whole association for nesting C-GRAPH sub-types
>
>   a C-GRAPH attribute for TRUTH - something TMs normally ignore
>
> This ontology is tiny - way smaller than [1].  For each C-GRAPH
> sub-type, it needs only a PSI, plus constraints on what other
> types might become its role players.
>
> TRUTH may be harder to define in XTM, but note: we don't have
> to *compute* TRUTH values for a typical C-GRAPH instance - some
> FOL software could do that.  Ontology C only must define a C-GRAPH
> network it evaluates, and set enough TRUTH values to get it going.
>
> Is this model on the right track for feeding inference engines?