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Ontolog Mini-Series on "Database And Ontology" (Session-10) - Thu 12-July-2007

  • Topic: "Analogical Reasoning With and About Databases and Knowledge Bases"

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, July 12, 2007
  • Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 6:30pm BST / 17:30 GMT/UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: 1.5~2.0 hours
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  • Please note that this session will be recorded, and the audio archive is expected to be made available as open content to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.

Attendees

  • Regrets:

Background

This is the 10th event of the "Database and Ontology mini-series" of talks and discussions, during which this community will be exploring the landscape, issues and interactions between databases and ontologies.

This is a community-driven set of activities, and is probably long overdue. On 15-Aug-2006, Tatiana Malyuta (who just joined the community after participating at our 23-Jul-2006 face-to-face workshop at Stanford, brought up her request for the Ontolog Forum to delve into the subject of "Database and Ontologiy." An almost unprecedented flurry of online responses were received from the community. It was decided that we could systematically pursue the subject by mounting a min-series on the matter at hand.

A planning meeting for this mini-series took place on 31-Aug-2006. Matthew West was invited to champion the effort, and a "Program & Technical Advisory Team" was formed, comprising Matthew West (Lead), Adrian Walker, Atilla Elci, John F. Sowa, Leo Obrst, Peter P. Yim, Susie Stephens & TatianaMalyuta.

See also: DatabaseAndOntology (the 'project' homepage for this mini-series)

The community is requested to contribute their thoughts by posting to [ontolog-forum] or to the DatabaseAndOntology wiki page (and/or its subpages). We hope to accumulate and synthesize the knowledge gathered and compile it into a written deliverable (a paper or even a handbook) that we could publish this collaboratively authored work to other relevant media and channels (like relevant conferences or the wikipedia.)

Agenda & Proceedings: "Database And Ontology" - Mini-series Session-10

  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call.
  • Agenda:
    • 1. Opening by the Session Chair - Susie Stephens
    • 2. we'll go around with a self-introduction of participants (10~15 minutes) - All - we'll skip this if we have moe than 20 participants (in which case, it will be best if members try to update their namesake pages on this wiki prior to the call so that everyone can get to know who's who more easily.)
    • 2. Introduction of the invited speaker - Matthew West
    • 3. Invited Speaker Presentation (60~75 minutes) - John F. Sowa
    • 5. Q & A and Open discussion by all participants (20~30 minutes)
    • 7. Summary / Conclusion / Follow-up by the Session Chair - Susie Stephens (~5 minutes)

Topic: Data and process revisited: ontology driving a paradigm shift in the development of business application systems

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/DatabaseAndOntology/2007-07-12_JohnSowa/JohnSowa_20070712.jpg [Dr. John Sowa]

Abstract (by JohnSowa)

Logical deduction is the foundation for the SQL query language and

for various reasoning methods used in databases and knowledge bases. For the past thirty years, deduction has proved to be a powerful method for stating queries and constraints about precisely defined and well structured data and doing complex reasoning about such data. Unfortunately, vast amounts of important data are unstructured and poorly defined. The cost of translating and formalizing such data is prohibitive, and deductive methods, even with probabilistic and fuzzy extensions, have met with limited success. The methods of analogical reasoning are self-adapting because they include aspects of deductive, inductive, and abductive techniques. Analogies can be applied with equal success to well structured and unstructured data, and they can be used to relate the two. This talk discusses several applications of analogical reasoning and shows how they can be used to support more flexible reasoning about unstructured data or about ontologies that relate structured and unstructured data.

About the Invited Speakers

John F. Sowa spent thirty years working on research and development projects at IBM and is a co-founder of VivoMind Intelligence, Inc. He has a BS in mathematics from MIT, an MA in applied mathematics from Harvard, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and he has taught courses at the IBM Systems Research Institute, universities (Binghamton, Polytechnic, and Stanford), and summer institutes (Linguistic Society of America and UQAM Cognitive Science). With his colleagues at VivoMind, he has been working on novel methods for combining logic-based symbolic processing of conceptual graphs with continuous numeric computations of knowledge signatures. This combination has made major improvements in the efficiency of algorithms for communication, reasoning, and natural language processing.

Resources

Questions, Answers & Discourse

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    • For those who have further questions or remarks on the topic, please post them to the [ontolog-forum] so that everyone in the community can benefit from the discourse.
  • ... More Questions
  • Session ended 2007.07.12 12:05 pm PDT

Audio Recording of this Session

Thanks to Arnold Yim for his work on editing and postprocessing the digital recording, and for tagging the mp3 file for podcast.

  • To download the audio recording of the session, click here
    • the playback of the audio files require the proper setup, and an MP3 compatible player on your computer.
  • Conference Date and Time: 12-Jul-2007 10:42am~12:05pm Pacific Time
  • Duration of Recording: 1 Hour 22 Minutes
  • Recording File Size: 9.4 MB (in mp3 format)
  • Telephone Playback
    • Prior to the Expiration Date of 12-Aug-2007 0:00 AM PT, one can call-in and hear the telephone playback of the session.
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      • Conference ID: 5823120#
      • Recording Reference Number: 100915#
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