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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] the next generation of Pc Design resources.
  • Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:15:39 -0500

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.




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