Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
Article in Datawarehouse.com on Semantic Technology
Roadmap à
Previous
comments on web service
execution
environment and ontology à [199]
The work by the WSMO (Web
Services Modeling Ontology) community à [201]
This bead is developed from notes made while preparing for a discussion about Service Oriented Architecture.
WSMX (Web Service Modelling eXecution environment) is the
reference implementation of WSMO
(Web Service Modelling Ontology). It is an execution environment for business
application integration where enhanced web services are integrated for various
business applications. The aim is to increase business processes automation in
a very flexible manner while providing scalable integration solutions. From {link}
An important question is: “Suppose that this execution environment was for “general social discussion” or “scientific interchanges”. Would a machine encoding of ontology about the concept of a web service be radically different? Are there assumptions made by business people that are narrow in ways that can be made precise?
Continuing with the discussion from {link}
WSMX started being driven by the need to have a semantic
execution environment capable to consume semantic messages, discover semantically
described web services, invoke and compose them for the end-user benefit. On
the way, many components have been added, to provide support for the main scope
of the execution environment.
The first sentence is problematic to many who feel that meaning is often not completely specified a precise definition using words. To have an execution environment one needs to have such definitions so that one can compute with in standard ways. The execution environment would, one images, fulfill some of the properties of natural language. We need regularity or form and some way to match function to form (data structure).
One has to be positive and indicate the excitement that we feel that a “semantic” execution environment is possible at all. Of course the environment is possible, but the question of universality is essential. Semantic interpretation occurs during human use of language.
Is semantic interpretation the same as semantic execution environment?
In my attempt to identify the problem with Semantic Web standards processes, I am trying to make political forces aware that there is a problem. The issues are hard to grasp, at first.
Amit Sheth is one of the key researchers in the Semantic Web community. In a paper published recently “ Semantic Content Management for Enterprises and the Web” we can see some of the language used. In the first paragraph the authors state.
The Semantic Web [reference to Tim Berners-Lee’s small paper back book
“Semantic Web”], some researchers hope, might have an even bigger impact than
what the WWW has achieved. This
requires that data or content – whether Web pages or anything exchanged and
displayed on Intranets and the Internet – be “semantically” annotated so that
the meaning of data is expressed such that programs can understand it.
Here is language, important and widely accepted in the Semantic Web community, that clearly says that this is not merely about a limited number of precisely defined function calls useful in accounting or commodity flow monitoring. Here the language is clearly about a proposition that most scholars in the humanities or the natural science would look at with great suspicion. In the second paragraph the authors state:
Researchers in diverse areas have studied semantics for a long
time. We have seen a steady progress
from syntax, to representation and structure, and to semantics [again the
reference to the small paper back book by Berners-Lee], in the ways we approach
ands solve the challenged of finding, integrating and using information of
diverse types and from diverse sources.
…
One wonders about the world that “we” live in.
I do not wish to stop whatever progress is being made on the development of computer program interoperability, but we must understand that the foundational problem that the most positive part of the Semantic Web community is solving is created by the software industry to preserve and protect proprietary methods that are far from optimal.
I wish to make a new approach know to the programming community, and to set aside the confusion that has created such a surrealistic world view as expressed by the authors and by Tim Berners-Lee.
The work I propose is published at:
http://www.datawarehouse.com/article/?articleId=5765
and more completely at:
Foundations for Knowledge
Science
I again refer to the CoreSystem work by Sandy Klausner as a far greater quality “Semantic Execution/Interpretation Environment” then what is likely to be developed by standards committees operating under the Semantic Web paradigm.
But Sandy’s work has not been, is not likely to be, adopted as a complete system and with the core thinking intact; because of the business environment and the absence of truly interdisciplinary scholarship and leadership.