[Scl] Re: Report on Common Logic

[pat hayes]

>Hi John..
>
>What follows may sound like I'm angry at you but let me say in advance that
>this is not the case.  Just want to make sure my view on this is clearly
>understood.
>
>>  I wouldn't say that it's "too complicated", but the current
>>  SCL document is not easy to read, especially by non-
>>  mathematicians (who are our major customers).  If Chris
>>  can find a way to make the SCL document substantially
>>  more palatable, that would be good.
>
>I don't feel very qualified to comment on technical issues right now, at
>least until I get caught back up with SCL.  However, I think worrying about
>"customer" acceptance is symptomatic of overly-academic thinking.
>
>The original reason behind the pursuit of CL was to provide for the "rest
>of us" (those more in the KIF than in the DL camp) to have a firm
>foundation for a practical ontology expression language.  I can assure you
>that 99% of those on the DL bandwagon don't understand much if anything
>about the formal underpinnings of it.  Why do we expect more from CL
>"customers"?  As I've said, there is at least one *commercial* user of a
>KIF-like language with seqvars, and that's Ontology Works.  I would include
>Cycorp and others, but I mention my company in particular (what I
>personally am interested in may differ) because we have only commercial and
>no academic interests.
>
>What we are interested in is a document to which we can point and say "look
>- we're following a standard!" so all the folks to whom that's important
>can feel better.  We also want that document to support the features that
>we find useful in *commercial* work, and seqvars are one of those features.
>
>Bottom line is that the complexity of the spec for seqvars doesn't bother
>me at all.  I will take the time to understand it because as an implementer
>it is important for me to get it right.  But for the bulk of CL (as it is
>for the DL) "customers" it won't matter a bit.  Why should they care about
>the complexity of a semantic specification that they will never need to
>read?
>
>One footnote - I don't think any potential acceptance problem for CL or its
>instance languages versus DL is due to a complexity issue in the semantics.
>It's due to the fact that DLs resemble both frame systems and OOP systems.
>Users of these systems are far more numerous than those comfortable writing
>FOL axioms and they find DLs comfortable, whatever their other virtues are
>for ontology authoring.

Right, exactly.  I highly concur.  And, it must be said, the DL folk 
can offer extremely efficient industrial-grade decision procedures.

>I don't have an answer for how to win such a
>popularity contest but I don't want to do it at the expense of tossing a
>feature that's so near and dear to my heart.

We will not toss it, and the technical decisions have already been 
made. John should not be re-opening old debates for no new reasons 
when we are under such pressure to get documents written.

Pat


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