Avoiding the complexity of HOL

[John F Sowa]

Doug,

Your criticisms of Common Logic (CL) in comparison to Cyc are irrelevant, because the Cyc project adopted CL as their semantic foundation.  In fact, the Cyc developer who had the strongest background in logic was a member of the CL design group.  He made sure that every statement in CycL had a direct mapping to and from CL,

A major goal for CL was the Semantic Web Logic Language (SWeLL) as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 2000.  In 2004, a branch of DoD that was unhappy about the much weaker OWL language, sponsored a much more ambitious version of logic to support SWeLL for high-end AI applications.   In 2004, they sponsored a two-year project to develop a new logic to support the more ambitious goals of  Tim B-L's original proposal and several high-end AI system, which included Cyc, and conceptual graphs, and other major AI systems.

There is much more to say about these issues, and I'll respond ln another note that addresses ongoing discussions about ontology languages.

Some people have complained that CL notation is too unreadable.  But that is hopelessly misguided:  CL is defined by abstract definitions that have ZERO readable or writable notations.  Any notation that anybody prefers qualifies as a CL notation as long as it satisfies the abstract definitions.  That would include CYCL and various notations that people are recommending in Ontolog Forum.

For more about these issues, please go to https://jfsowa.com/ikl  .   The text at that location is an overview with multiple links to the original R & D documents in every paragraph.  

Section 2 about the IKRIS project:  "The Project for Interoperable Knowledge Representation for Intelligence Support (IKRIS) was sponsored by the US Department of Defense in 2005 and 2006. IKRIS brought together an impressive group of researchers with backgrounds in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, logic, and ontology. Its primary products were the specification of the IKL language and the evaluation of IKL as a basis for interoperability among systems that use different versions of logic."

The IKL language, which was specified by that group, was later standardized as ISO Common Logic.  The IKL group consisted of Bill Andersen, Richard Fikes, Patrick Hayes, Charles Klein, Deborah McGuiness, Christopher Menzel, John Sowa, Christopher Welty, and Wlodek Zadrozny. 

I'll say more about related issues in a response to an ongoing thread on Ontolog Forum.

John