[topicmapmail] Topic Maps, Description Logics and Semantic Networks

[Murray Altheim]

Giuliano Vivanet wrote:
> Dear Mr.Garshol,
> firstly I want to thank you so much for your answer. Your suggestions are very
> useful for me.
> 
> Our main research project goal is to define a learning objects design model;
> this will be based on Topic Maps and XTM. At the same time we are exploring the
> relationships between TMs and knowledge representation systems in the field of
> Artificial Intelligence. We have realized that there are some similarities
> between TMs and KL-ONE (in particular) and then we are searching for some
> reference... Reading your answer, my first impression is that this topic has
> not been investigated until now...

Giuliano,

Are you investigating/comparing surface structures or their underlying
abstract models? I'm curious because a number of the technologies
mentioned in this discussion have no abstract model that ties into any
common framework, hence any comparison is by definition subjective. For
those that do reference a mathematically-sound model there can of course
be a real comparison. I would urge you to check out the work on Common
Logic (CL) as that would at least tie RDF down to CL (according to Pat
Hayes, who wrote the model for RDF and is involved in the CL work), and
I believe someone *may* have already done the work to tie DL into CL,
but if not the language of DL can be linked directly to FOL so that
shouldn't be too much of a stretch (though of course one is a superset
of the other; you'd be left out on a limb for anything not defined in
FOL, which with DL is quite a bit).

Topic Maps does not (yet, to my knowledge) make any reference to CL (or
FOL) so this can only be added as an ontology *on top of* the existing
Topic Maps model (effectively ignoring the TM model and simply using it
as a graph carrier for the CL or FOL semantics via a PSI set, which is
what I think most people do and would recommend given the absence of an
alternative -- the two Association Templates in XTM were left deliberately
vague since we didn't have any scope to create a mathematically-sound
model at that time, though I think some French mathematician wrote one
subsequently).

There is a CG set of PSIs in the Ceryle release and I believe a few
other people have done work along these lines. The CL spec is meant to
have URI identifiers for all constructs so when that is finally
published those would be suitable identifiers.

Not sure if this is any help. (Common Logic is easily found via Google)

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com>                           ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
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