permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

christophe mckeon gonzalez de leon wrote:
> hi,
>
> > Drawing on every pattern and technique we can document with very high
> > degree of confidence,
> > we can synthesize that knowledge into a relational database of proven
> > practices,
>
> i would advise against a relational database at this point. permaculture
> is replete with multi-disciplinary information, and is in constant flux. 
> rdms's
> have the "we know the entirety of the problem domain at the outset" mindset.
> semantic triple stores do not have this limitation, there is no central schema
> written in some separate DDL but a multiplicity of ontologies with connections
> between them expressed in rdf triples just as the data itself is
> expressed in rdf
> triples. these 'schemas' are also dynamic and can be updated at
> runtime, as well
> as distributed in that it is easy to use multiple ontologies from
> multiple sources
> in a single application. so instead of reinventing the wheel for the
> data model behind
> a social network for instance, you just load up the foaf ontology over
> the wire. if you
> need to work with plant systematics you load up the relevant ontology
> that some domain
> experts have already done all the hard work writing. there are many

Where is an example or further explanation of this?

> other very good
> practical reasons why a pcdb should go with semantic web technologies,
> and i'll be
> posting about it to the pcdb list in the next few months.

Very interesting. I will look forward to reading more about this.

> > organized around the Holdridge Life Zones. 
> > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdridge_life_zones
>
> thanks for this link, looks quite interesting, and so is your idea of
> extending it to
> urban areas. i'll have to read more about it.
>
> > Anybody want to work on this with me?
> > Maybe someone already working on Pc database design?

Read my earlier post in this thread about work already done.

> another great thing about ontologies is that they are more amenable to
> collaborative
> design than schemas and there are already some interesting tools for doing so.
> one thing you and anybody else interested in your idea (me) can do is to work
> collaboratively on an owl ontology, then later integrating it into any number 
> of
> applications becomes much easier than if you had started with a
> relational schema
> because you can capture much richer semantics in owl and abstract out
> a great deal
> of the logic normally expressed in application code.

I would be interested in hearing more about owl and possibly 
contributing to a PC knowledgebase project using owl as a starting point.

> http://protege.stanford.edu/
> http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Collaborative_Protege
> http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/WebProtege
>
> > Sounds like it would be a great resource, there is a guy here who is redoing 
> > (with permission) the Plants for a future database,
> > more ergonomic, and in French/English.
>
> who's the guy doing redoing pfaf?
>
> >  Could be we could link some of these projects together,
>
> using ontologies, linking these projects is as easy as just writing a
> new ontology
> which incorporates them both, and establishes equivalences between the two.
>
> can you tell i like ontologies?
>
> _c

This is fascinating. Googling ontology gave me some ideas. I will share 
these in another post after I have absorbed the following:

From Wikipedia:
"Ontology (from the Greek ??, genitive ?????: of being (neuter 
participle of ?????: to be) and -?????, -logia: science, study, theory) 
is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality 
in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their 
relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of 
philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions 
concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such 
entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided 
according to similarities and differences."

and from Stanford University:

http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/kst-overview.html
Knowledge Sharing Technology Project
Project Leader: Richard Fikes
Knowledge Sharing Technology is a research project in progress at the 
Stanford University Knowledge Systems Laboratory .

The objectives of this project are to develop technology and 
methodologies that will enable the sharing and reusing of knowledge 
bases. Many impediments, both technical and social must be overcome to 
achieve these goals. Two central problems which we are addressing in 
this project are the following:

    * Heterogeneous Representation Languages: There is no single 
knowledge representation that is best for all problems, nor is there 
likely to be one the choice of one form of knowledge representation over 
another can have a big impact on a system's performance. Thus, in many 
cases, sharing and reusing knowledge will involve translating from one 
representation to another. Tools are needed that can help automate the 
translation process.
    * Heterogeneous Ontologies: Even if the representation problems are 
resolved, it can still be difficult to combine two knowledge bases or 
establish effective communications between them. The absence of a shared 
vocabulary presents a further barrier, which could be removed through 
the development of shared sets of explicitly defined terminology, 
sometimes called ontologies. For such ontologies to be useful, the 
definitions provided must include declarative constraints that specify 
the semantics of the terms being defined, and the ontology must provide 
procedural methods that enforce those constraints when the terms are 
used in an application.

The project is being conducted in conjunction with and in support of the 
activities of the ARPA Knowledge-Sharing Effort. In particular, the 
objectives of our project are to develop technology and methodologies for:

    * Building ontologies in a form that is translatable into the 
specialized representation languages of multiple application system 
environments, and
    * Interchanging the reusable content of knowledge bases, including 
ontologies, among specialized representation languages.

The interlingua representation language being developed in the 
Knowledge-Sharing Effort is called a Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF). 
KIF is intended to be a language for communication (``literary 
publication'' of knowledge) and is designed to make the epistemological 
level content of a knowledge base clear to the reader, but not to 
support automated reasoning in that form.

The problems involved in interchanging knowledge bases are not yet well 
understood, and there is open debate as to whether a generally useful 
interlingua can be specified. In this project, we are attempting to 
inform that debate by developing tools for translating knowledge bases 
into and out of KIF (see Figure 1), and using those tools to conduct 
knowledge interchange experiments that will substantially test the 
viability and adequacy of KIF as an interlingua.

With respect to ontologies, we are focusing on what we consider to be a 
central barrier to the development and use of common ontologies, namely 
the lack of an integrated computational ontology development environment 
that provides practical tools for precisely specifying the meaning of 
terms in an ontology; incorporating, extending and integrating existing 
ontologies; and translating the resulting ontologies into the 
specialized representation languages of application systems. We are 
developing an ontology development environment called Ontolingua and are 
working with engineers who will use Ontolingua to identify and 
illustrate candidate high payoff extensions to the current PDES/STEP 
standards.

And from there also, on ontology:

http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html
What is an Ontology?

This definition was originally proposed in 1992 and posted as shown 
below. See an updated definition of ontology (computer science) that 
accounts for the literature before and after that posting, with links to 
further readings.

Tom Gruber <gruber@ksl.stanford.edu>

Short answer:
    An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.

The word "ontology" seems to generate a lot of controversy in 
discussions about AI. It has a long history in philosophy, in which it 
refers to the subject of existence. It is also often confused with 
epistemology, which is about knowledge and knowing.

In the context of knowledge sharing, I use the term ontology to mean a 
specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a 
description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts 
and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. 
This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as 
set-of-concept-definitions, but more general. And it is certainly a 
different sense of the word than its use in philosophy.

What is important is what an ontology is for. My colleagues and I have 
been designing ontologies for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing 
and reuse. In that context, an ontology is a specification used for 
making ontological commitments. The formal definition of ontological 
commitment is given below. For pragmetic reasons, we choose to write an 
ontology as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary. Although this 
isn't the only way to specify a conceptualization, it has some nice 
properties for knowledge sharing among AI software (e.g., semantics 
independent of reader and context). Practically, an ontological 
commitment is an agreement to use a vocabulary (i.e., ask queries and 
make assertions) in a way that is consistent (but not complete) with 
respect to the theory specified by an ontology. We build agents that 
commit to ontologies. We design ontologies so we can share knowledge 
with and among these agents.

This definition is given in the article:

T. R. Gruber. A translation approach to portable ontologies. Knowledge 
Acquisition, 5(2):199-220, 1993. Available on line.

A more detailed description is given in

T. R. Gruber. Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for 
knowledge sharing. Presented at the Padua workshop on Formal Ontology, 
March 1993, later published in International Journal of Human-Computer 
Studies, Vol. 43, Issues 4-5, November 1995, pp. 907-928. Available online.