diff --git a/doc/report/towards.tex b/doc/report/towards.tex index dcda5f7abb036dd1feacd7343d41153634c03a69..5bdc0c5cd6a98b4fe653b89bc165f74d21edf604 100644 --- a/doc/report/towards.tex +++ b/doc/report/towards.tex @@ -7,53 +7,12 @@ ontology design in general. The contribution of this section is primarily that of potential for future work. At this point in time, the ideas formulated here lack concrete implementations. -\subsection{Automatic Processing} - -Let us first look at some system level concerns. It is true that the -upper level ontology and tetrapodal search are most certainly in their -infancy. As such it is easy to dismiss concerns about scalability as -premature. Regardless, we encourage research on ULO and tetrapodal -search to keep the greater picture in mind. We believe that a greater -tetrapodal search system can only succeed if the process of export and -indexing is completely automated. Automation, we believe, come downs -to two things, (1)~automation of the export infrastructure and -(2)~enabling automation through machine readability. - -\emph{Automation of Exports.} First of all, we believe that the -export of third party library into Endpoint storage needs to be fully -automated. We believe this is the for two major reason. First of all, -syntax errors and invalid predicates need to be avoided. It is -unreasonable to expect a systems administrator to fix each ULO~export -in its one particular way. At the very least, automated -validators~\cite{rval, rcmd} should be used to check the validity of -ULO~exports. - -\emph{Enabling Automation Through Machine Readability.} The second -problem is one of normalization. The goal of RDF and related -technologies was to have universal machine readable knowledge -available for querying. As such it is necessary to make efforts such -that ULO exports we create are machine readable, that is it is easy -for programs to interpret the encoded knowledge. We want to remind the -reader of the previously discussed \texttt{ulo:sourceref} dilemma -(Section~\ref{sec:exp}). It required special domain knowledge about -the specific export for us to resolve a source reference to actual -source code. A machine readable approach would be to instead decide on -a fixed format for field such as \texttt{ulo:sourceref}. This makes it -easy for application implementors to take full advantage of any -ULO knowledge base. - -Infrastructure that runs without the need of outside intervention and -a machine readable knowledge base can lay out the groundwork for a -greater tetrapodal search system. - \subsection{The Challenge of Universality} -While system level concerns must not be discarded, we believe they are -a small problem compared to the challenge of ontology design as a -whole. Remember that ULO aims to be a universal language for -formulating organizational mathematical knowledge. An outstandingly -grand task. ULO aims at nothing less than a universal schema on top -of all collected (organizational) mathematical knowledge. +ULO aims to be a universal language for capturing organizational +mathematical knowledge. An outstandingly grand task. ULO in +particular aims at nothing less than a universal schema on top of all +collected (organizational) mathematical knowledge. The current version of ULO already yields worthwhile results when formal libraries are exported to ULO~triplets. Especially when it @@ -76,12 +35,11 @@ to maintain organizational knowledge in a format that is both (1)~as correct as possible and (2)~easy to generalize and search. Future development of the upper level ontology first needs to be very clear on where it wants to position itself on this spectrum between accuracy -and generalizability. - -In its position as an upper level ontology, we believe that ULO is best -positioned as an ontology that favors generality at the cost of -accuracy. It can serve as a generalized way of indexing vast amounts -of formal knowledge, making it easy to discover and connect. +and generalizability. In its position as an upper level ontology, we +believe that ULO is best positioned as an ontology that favors +generality at the cost of accuracy. It can serve as a generalized way +of indexing vast amounts of formal knowledge, making it easy to +discover and connect. \subsection{A Layered Knowledge Architecture} @@ -94,11 +52,11 @@ of formal knowledge, making it easy to discover and connect. in an additional step.}\label{fig:love} \end{center}\end{figure} -While it is true that ULO as one concrete ontology will need to -converge on a specific point on that spectrum, namely one of -generalizability in favor of accuracy, this does not mean that we need -to give up on accuracy as a whole. We believe that we can have -both. We can have our cake and eat it it too. +ULO as one concrete ontology will need to converge on one specific +point on the accuracy-generalizability spectrum, namely at the place +where generalizability is chosen in favor of accuracy. But this does +not mean that we need to give up on accuracy as a whole. We believe +that we can have both, we can have our cake and eat it it too. Current exports investigated in this report take the approach of taking some library of formal knowledge and then converting that