Thinking Clearly .

There were a fair number of interesting papers at ISWC, but I direct your attention to two:

• The Pathetic Fallacy
• Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL

Read the first to remind yourself that just because something is respected, respectible, and even cool doesn’t mean it’s useful (for your task). Read the second to remind yourself that formal semantics are good (or can be; done right!).

The first is a polemic, and a quite useful one. The second is a nice piece of theoretical computer science. I’d have to rate this ISWC as a good one since you can get at least one decent instance of each (i.e., a polemic and a bit of compsci theory), and these are better than merely decent.

The SPARQL paper won best paper (deservedly) and is serving as the basis of the new specification of the SPARQL language. Let me just say: Yay!

In a prior post, I tried to articulate some of the parameters of when OWL is a good fit for an application. Browsing around, I re-stumbled upon this old paper
Living with CLASSIC: When and How to Use a KL-ONE-Like Language. OWL is, indeed, a KL-ONE-like language and a lot of the points in this paper are still applicable.

(Classic was a funky language! Forward chaining rules, procedural attachments (for “test”), rather tight integration with a programming language, weirdly shaped DL, etc.)

I’ve been thinking about empathy and symmetry arguments in moral theory. Pluralism with regard to fundamental moral issues is really hard. But torture is still wrong! (Aggressive war, too, y’know.)

Franz Baadar is a very smart cookie with a lot of excellent, influential work. One of my favorite papers by him is not one that reports results, but instead is an overview piece called Logic-based Knowledge Representation. He’s not the only person who’s written and written well on this topic. But this is a very nice paper that touches on what’s wrong with first order logic per se as a KR formalism (including the interesting point that FOL doesn’t support “structured representation” of knowledge, i.e., syntactic grouping of information), Description Logic vs. Logic Programming, modal logics, and nonmonontonic logics.

Enjoy.

Torture, last I checked, is still really, really, really bad. Condemn it today!