« Ning grows... | Main | Carlos González-Cadenas Talks with Talis about ExperienceOn Ventures and transforming travel »
26 September 2007
Rules for a Realistic Semantic Web?
Posted by Ian Davis at September 26, 2007 11:11 PM
In one of my linkblog entries earlier this week I made the following claim:
IMHO OWL isn’t part of the petatriple future of the semweb. Nor is SPARQL…
A recent post by Chimezie touched on this too:
I've been spending quite a bit of time on FuXi mainly because I am interested in empirical evidence which supports a school of thought which claims that Description Logic based inference (Tableaux-based inference) will never scale as well the Logic Programming equivalent - at least for certain expressive fragments of Description Logic (I say expressive because even given the things you cannot express in this subset of OWL-DL there is much more in Horn Normal Form (and Datalog) that you cannot express even in the underlying DL for OWL 1.1). The genesis of this is a paper I read, which lays out the theory, but there was no practice to support the claims at the time (at least that I knew of). If you are interested in the details, the paper is "Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic" and written by many people who are working in the Rule Interchange Format Working Group.
It is not light reading, but is complementary to some of Bijan's recent posts about DL-safe rules and SWRL.
A follow-up is a paper called "A Realistic Architecture for the Semantic Web" which builds on the DLP paper and makes claims that the current OWL (Description Logic-based) Semantic Web inference stack is problematic and should instead be stacked ontop of Logic Programming since Logic Programming algorithm has a much richer and pervasively deployed history (all modern relational databases, prolog, etc..)
I'm not a DL expert but, based on my research, it seems to that DL based inference for OWL isn't going deliver for the semantic web any time soon. Of course, by this I mean it's not going to scale in such a way that makes real-time inferencing over petatriples viable. Besides, OWL and its variations are still very limited in their expressivity and not particularly useful for many classes of applications. Maybe rule systems can deliver instead?
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.talis.com/mt/mt-tb.r280.cgi/1008
