Common Logic and Controlled Natural Languages

Folks,

In March, I used the following slides in a talk about
Common Logic:

    http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/cl_hitps.pdf
    Common Logic for Healthcare Information Technology

I received an offline note that said the slides seemed to focus
more on CLCE than on Common Logic.  But I made the point that
the primary argument is *not* for CLCE but for controlled NLs
(see the readings at the end).  And I believe that the combination
of Common Logic + controlled NLs is the "killer app" that could
make both a success:

  1. You can't have a multiplicity of controlled NLs without a
     common formalized semantics, such as CL.

  2. A methodology based on controlled NLs as the intermediate stage
     between informal specifications or requirements documents and
     the open-ended variety of special-purpose languages is essential.

As people have noticed, RDF and OWL are not readable notations,
and people have tried to invent controlled NLs that map to them.
But RDF and OWL are both very quirky languages, primarily because
they mix logic with special-purpose data structures (triples)
and special-purpose algorithms (DL proof procedures).  It's hard
to map natural languages to and from notations that have been
designed for specialized algorithms and data structures.

Of all commercial applications of logic, the Semantic Web is
tiny in comparison to the "500-pound gorilla in the room":  SQL.
Every commercial web site incorporates an SQL database, and
SQL has been the outstanding example of the commercial success
of FOL for the past 30+ years.  The WHERE clause in SQL is FOL,
but with negation as failure (as in Prolog).

One of the major problems of the Semantic Web is that it has not
been integrated with relational databases, and it is awkward to
download all or part of an SQL DB into RDF.  But if you support
full n-tuples, as in Common Logic, it is trivial to download an
SQL DB or an RDF DB into CL and to define relations between them.
Common Logic supports Unicode and the W3C naming conventions,
and it includes an XML-based dialect called XCL.

RDF and OWL can be handled as special-purpose subsets of Common
Logic (in fact, Pat Hayes, one of the chief architects of the
CL semantics was also one of the chief architects of the LBase
semantics for RDF and OWL).  Common Logic supports Unicode and
the W3C naming conventions, and it includes an XML-based dialect
called XCL.

With Common Logic as the semantic foundation and controlled NLs
plus various kinds of diagrams as the human interface, it becomes
possible to integrate the Semantic Web, SQL databases, rule-based
systems, and many other kinds of logic-based applications.

I believe that is the direction for the future.

John


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: cg-unsubscribe@...
For additional commands, e-mail: cg-help@...