RE: [ontolog-forum] Protégé as a Programming Language: Rethinking Ontology Engineering Beyond the IDEB

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John F Sowa

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Sep 17, 2025, 6:10:21 PM (4 days ago) Sep 17
to ontolo...@googlegroups.com, CG, Arun Majumdar
Jack,

I have a high respect for the ontology expertise of the people at the Stanford Medical Center.  They're the ones who developed Protege.  Unfortunately, they got stuck with OWL.  

They were involved with the R & D during the 1990s, which Tim Berners-Lee cited extensively in his winning proposal for the Semantic Web in October 2000.  His proposal for SWeLL (Semantic Web Logic Language) was the inspiration for the project that became Common Logic.  

Unfortunately, the decidability gang hijacked the Semantic Web with their hopelessly mistaken goal.  In 2004 (before the SW project finished), other gov't agencies realized that the SW project was much, much less powerful  than Tim BL's winning proposal of 2000.   They sponsored the more powerful IKRIS project with a more solid logical foundation.

For a summary of those developments (with many, many citations of the original publications), see https://jfsowa.com/ikl .  That project produced their final reports in 2006.  But the October 2006 budget was delayed and hamstrung by political hassles that blocked further funding.

Arun Majumdar and I were among the researchers involved in the IKRIS project, we contributed to those publications, and our VivoMind company delivered products that were based on logical foundations that were closer to Tim BL's original proposal than to the hopelessly degenerate OWL.

For a summary of our VivoMind developments up to 2010, I'm sure you've seen https://jfsowa.com/talks/cogmem.pdf .

Our new Permion Inc company is based on a hybrid neurosymbolic foundation that combines an extension of the symbolic reasoning methods to evaluate the results produced by LLMs and guarantee precise, logic-based results.

For examples, jump to slide 44 of cogmem.pdf.  Those examples were implemented with the purely symbolic VivoMind technology.  And NONE of them could be implemented with LLMs by themselves.  But that symbolic technology combined with LLMs provides the best of both worlds:  Guaranteed logical precision with a conversational English front end supported by LLMs.

To answer your question below, the hybrid technology provides "a declarative programming language for ontology engineers and taxonomists" from novices to professionals.

John
 




What if Protégé wasn’t just a development environment, but a language in its own right?
What if we’ve been overlooking its potential as a declarative programming language for ontology engineers and taxonomists?


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