Some things provably suck (was Future Systems of the Past

[John F Sowa]

Mike, we've discussed related issues before.  I agree that pointless criticism does not solve problems.  But some technologies really do suck.  I believe that it's important to tell people (1) Why those technologies suck; (2) What other options are available; and (3) How they can make a transition from the worse to the better.  But I also know that it's rarely possible to replace legacy software in the short term.  Therefore, interim measures are often necessary.

As I said in a previous note, I have been doing that for years.  At IBM in the 1970s, I wrote a memo that had a strong influence on killing a bad project before the managers who were responsible for it had time to unfurl their golden parachutes.  That memo saved IBM quite a few $$$, but it caused some highly placed managers to "hate my guts".  Fortunately, my manager arranged for me to get me a transfer outside of their chain of command.

M. Bergman:  Please refrain from your incessant put-downs and dismissals of W3C semantic standards. No one is forcing you, or anyone else, to  use it. I think the constant denigration speaks more to you than the standards.

Short answer:  When some method is provably worse than others, anybody who can show the proof has an obligation to show exactly how and why the situation can be remedied.

Tim Berners-Lee had an excellent vision for the Semantic Web in his winning proposal in 2000.  Unfortunately, he decided to allow voting by a huge W3C committee to make design decisions.  The deciability gang (some very intelligent logicians who had no experience with practical computation) stacked the voting to enforce decidabiity.  That derailed some much better projects, and installed a theoretical basis for OWL that destroyed Tim's vision.

Please read "Fads and fallacies about logic" https://jfsowa.com/pubs/fflogic.pdf .  In that article, I cited working systems that were far superior to anything based on OWL.  I also showed theoretical reasons for an implemented alternative (not by me) that was simpler, easier to implement, easier to read and write, more efficient, and on a faster growth path to the future.   As support for that article, Jim Hendler, who had written the original requirements for the proposal that Tim B-L won, agreed with me, liked the article I wrote, and approved it for publication.  (At that time he was the editor of the IEEE journal in which it was published.

First of all, I recommend the following overview of AI tools and theories for supporting applications of AI to practical applications of databases and knowledge bases.  You don't have to believe anything I wrote.   I recommend the following overview:  Semantics for interoperable systems, https:/jfsowa.com/ikl  

That overview of systems from the 1980s to about 2018 contains 48 URLs to articles written by other people.   I'm not asking you to believe anything I say.  But I am asking you to review what many knowledgeable people have written in those citations.

The most important part of that overview is the section on the IKRIS project (from 2004 to 2006) which was funded by a different branch of the US government from the one that funded the W3C project.  The people who funded IKRIS were very unhappy that the W3C had adopted a direction that was far worse than what Tim B-L had proposed. When I wrote my fflogic article, my criticism was mild in comparison to the issues discussed and developed by IKRIS. 

The IKRIS project included quite a few very knowledgeable people who have contributed quite a few influential notes and talks to Ontolog Forum,  (See the list of participants in some of the articles).  It also includes people who developed the logic foundations for Common Logic and other important contributions.

MB: John, you too often violate in my opinion Peirce's admonition to not block the way to inquiry.

As I said before, there is much more to say --  mostly very constructive.  But sometimes, a bit of destruction is necessary to clear the way of inquiry.  Peirce himself did quite a bit of destruction along the way.  In fact, many of his later writings destroyed or made major revisions to some of his earlier projects.

John