[Corpora-List] [NLP2RDF] Announcement: NLP Interchange Format (NIF) 1.0 Spec, Demo and Reference Implementation

Adam Kilgarriff adam at lexmasterclass.com
Sun Dec 4 14:28:59 UTC 2011


John and everyone.

great stuff (I did enjoy the Tim Bray piece)

Eagerly awaiting the pro-RDF camp's response

Adam

On 4 December 2011 01:58, John F. Sowa <sowa at bestweb.net> wrote:

> Dear Jens, Ewan, Matt, Leo, and Arnim,
>
> JL
>
>  Are you talking about RDF/XML syntax specifically? Otherwise,
>> you are comparing apples and oranges, since RDF can be serialised
>> in different formats like Turtle.
>>
>
> Unfortunately, RDF is wrong in so many ways that it is hard to summarize
> them.  There is nothing wrong with having a readable human notation that
> compiles into an unreadable but efficient computer version.  But the
> RDF/XML notation is so bloated that it is horribly inefficient for
> computer processing, network transmission, and storage.
>
> At the semantic level, a serious flaw of RDF is the complete lack of
> typing.  There is no way to indicate that a URI is intended to represent
> a literal (the URI itself), the document identified by the URI, the
> content of that document, or the result of evaluating that content
> (if it happens to contain some executable or interpretable language).
>
> JL
>
>  IBM Watson does use some background knowledge from the Web of Data
>> (DBpedia).
>>
>
> The IBM research group headed by Dave Ferrucci was aware of RDF, but
> they designed UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture)
> as a more compact, readable, and efficient XML-based format.
>
> For Watson, they used a large volume of web resources, including some
> that may have been developed with RDF.  But to say that IBM actually
> used RDF in any essential way would be misleading.
>
> JL
>
>  Facebook has OpenGraph (http://ogp.me/).
>>
>
> They do not use RDF.  They use RDFa, which is a notation for tagging
> HTML (or XML) documents.  But RDFa has nothing in common with RDF/XML
> other than the three letters R, D, and F.  Facebook, like nearly
> everybody who uses RDFa tags, translates the data from those tags
> to a more efficient notation than RDF -- JSON, for example.
>
> Even the W3C documents show that the translation to JSON is simpler,
> more compact, and more efficient than the translation to RDF/XML.
> Look at their document http://dev.w3.org/html5/md-LC/ and compare
> Section 5.1 (translation to JSON) to Section 5.2 (translation to RDF).
>
> JL
>
>  Google Shopping uses it (http://purl.org/**goodrelations/<http://purl.org/goodrelations/>
>> ).
>>
>
> GoodRelations is an ontology that happens to be expressed in OWL.
> But if you look at the actual OWL statements, you'll notice that
> they don't use any features of OWL that could not be expressed
> in Aristotle's original syllogisms.  In fact, the overwhelming
> majority of sites that claim to use OWL don't go beyond Aristotle.
>
> Furthermore, Google is one of the founding members of schema.org,
> which has developed their own vocabulary and methods of processing.
> See their hierarchy of terms:  http://schema.org/docs/full.**html<http://schema.org/docs/full.html>
>
> Look at the way they use those terms:  http://schema.org/docs/gs.html
> You won't see any RDF or OWL there.
>
> EK
>
>> I'm not quite sure what you mean by "expressing triples" -- is it
>> the URIs that you have problems with?
>>
>
> That's a separate issue.  I just meant that the information expressed
> in RDF/XML can be stated more simply, readably, and efficiently in
> many other notations, ranging from LISP to JSON.
>
> EK
>
>> RDF also provides a foundation for OWL, which is increasingly used for
>> ontologies
>>
>
> See the above point about Aristotle.  And see the remarks below by
> R. V. Guha, who worked with Tim Bray to define RDF.  Guha now works
> at Google, where he is one of the chief proponents of schema.org.
>
> As for Tim Bray, he apologized for the mistakes in RDF.  As Tim said,
> "It's the syntax, stupid."  See his web site:
>
>   http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/**When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet>
>
> EK
>
>> the growth of the LOD cloud suggests that there is a lot of mileage
>> in the linking part of Linked Data.
>>
>
> Linked Open Data (LOD) began with the WWW twenty years ago.  The RDF+OWL
> method of doing semantics "never caught on." (That is a quotation from
> the talk by Guha, cited below.)  Guha also noted that the adoption rate
> of schema.org is much faster than RDF and OWL.  In terms of web pages,
> it already dwarfs the use of RDF/XML.
>
> MP
>
>> But RDF itself is just the underlying subj-pred-obj triples model
>>
>
> As I said, that model can be expressed more easily in LISP or JSON.
> For a linguist, calling those triples a "subj-pred-obj model" is so
> hopelessly naive that there is no way they could take it seriously.
>
> Leo
>
>> R.V. Guha of Google (talking about schema.org at the Ontolog Forum
>> yesterday: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-**bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_**
>> 2011_12_01<http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2011_12_01>
>> )
>> and Dan Brickley said that originally in the late 1990s RDF had
>> an s-expression -like syntax: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-**
>> pics-ng-metadata <http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-pics-ng-metadata>
>>
>> but that "then XML happened."
>>
>
> Yes.  In response to my question about using a LISP-like syntax, Guha
> said "I wish we could have done that."  For anybody who might still be
> interested in this topic, I strongly recommend Guha's talk about
> schema.org and the discussion period, which addressed many related
> issues.
>
> AB
>
>> Conceptual Graphs have never really made it either.
>> Some don't know what KIF stands for but see no prb in
>> foaf:currentProject & monotonic RDF.
>> So.. lets call it research
>>
>
> That is true of every notation for NLP semantics.  WordNet is
> probably the most widely used NLP resource, but they don't claim
> that their notation is suitable as an interchange format for NLP.
>
> The FOAF work is more popular because it is at a very low level
> that does not require any knowledge of logic, ontology, or
> linguistics.  That is also why the usage of schema.org is
> growing rapidly:  it doesn't use scary words like 'logic'
> or 'ontology' that frighten the unwashed masses.
>
> John
>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/**corpora<http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora>
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/**listinfo/corpora<http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora>
>



-- 
========================================
Adam Kilgarriff <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/>
adam at lexmasterclass.com
Director                                    Lexical Computing
Ltd<http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/>

Visiting Research Fellow                 University of
Leeds<http://leeds.ac.uk>

*Corpora for all* with the Sketch Engine <http://www.sketchengine.co.uk>

                        *DANTE: a lexical database for
English<http://www.webdante.com>
                  *
========================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20111204/168f1d6d/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora


More information about the Corpora mailing list