KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION:

DESTRUCTURING THE

STRUCTURED vs NON-STRUCTURED DEBATE

Jean Rohmer ESILV Paris

jean.rohmer@devinci.fr

Presented at ECAI 2012 Montpellier Workshop on AI and KM

My personal background in CS, AI and KM

Started Computer Science 45 years ago

Started AI 32 years ago

Started KM 24 years ago

Management of Bull CEDIAG team

IDELIANCE Semantic Tool (1993)

Many Military Intelligence Applications Data + Text + Semantics

Blog: "PLEXUS LOGOS CALX"

See also SLIDESHARE Jean Rohmer

Progress in KR is slow.

Mesopotamia 5500 years ago:

Mesopotamia in the 21 th Century: still Stone Age:

AI and KM: once a Love Story

In the late 80's a love story between AI and KM

Their alliances: (rings) Knowledge Representation and Inference

Importance of KRL languages, KADS modelling : Open Kads tool (1991)

Early 90's: economical crisis: the AI + KM couple almost starving

AI and KM were young, promising, but still immature

KM alone could earn some living in large corporations

The Web arrived and seduced KM

AI was left alone

<<< Tim Berners Lee paper proposing the Web was rejected at the 1991 ACM Hypertext

Conference>>>

Hypertext was very close to KM

Catastrophe

2012: Large scientific Agencies manage all their projects with EXCEL

2012: Many Engineering Schools have no real information systems

2012: ECAI program, proceedings are available just in PDF, without any tool for knowledge organization

2012: they swapped my last name and first name in SOME ECAI registration files

AI and KM are alone

AI lives with Automatic Learning Algorithms

KM flirts with wikis, blogs, social networks

The main tool for AI is SVM algorithm (sort of joke)

The main tool for KM is EXCEL + POWERPOINT (not a joke)

There is no paper on KR at ECAI 2012

Denegation: "AI is hidden everywhere"

Laurence Danlos: (NL guru):

"We failed to make machines adapt to humans; we humans have learnt how to use windows and menus"

History

In the early 80's, AI languages (LISP, PROLOG, KRL, Constraints later) were seen as the promise of a revolution in programming computers: declarative programming

1982: Alain COLMERAUER declares that PROLOG is designed to replace COBOL

European Esprit programme: 1982: KIMS project "Knowledge and Information Management

System"

Earlier: Alan Turing tried to get funds from UK Gvt to build a sort of LISP MACHINE

Earlier: Leibniz and Descartes proposed universal knowledge representation and reasoning languages.

PROJECT OF A COMPUTABLE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

INCLUDING UNIVERSAL ONTOLOGIES WITH « COMBINATORIAL » MECANISMS

DESCARTES :

« établir un ordre entre toutes les pensées, … de même qu'il y en a un établi entre les nombres »

« cette langue aiderait au jugement , lui représentant si distinctement les choses qu’il lui serait presque impossible de se tromper »

« je tiens que cette langue est possible … mais n ’espérez jamais la voir en usage … sauf au Paradis Terrestre … »

LEIBNIZ : « quoique cette langue dépende de la vraie philosophie, elle ne dépend pas de sa perfection »

« à mesure que la science des hommes croîtra, cette langue croîtra aussi »

« alors raisonner et calculer sera la même chose »

80's: Expert Systems with KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERS

1988 -1992: METAPEDIA project in SPAIN: a fully object-oriented encyclopaedia

1990: Idea that future Corporate Information Systems would be Knowledge Based Systems

1991: MNEMOS EUREKA European project

1991 (Bull Cediag): Corporate Intelligence = Corporate Memory + Corporate Decision + Corporate Visibility

PROLOG

In 2012 we celebrate the 40th anniversary of PROLOG

(Where is the cake ?)

Personal History

1984: “Alexander Method” (Foundation of Datalog / Deductive Databases)

For me, illuminated by Prolog , “Everything was logic predicates”

1990: Expert Systems were very successful

1990: Expert Systems demand much more intellectual energy than available

1993: Start developing IDELIANCE: a personal semantic networks manager for "everybody"

fr.slideshare.net/Jean_Rohmer/ideliance-semantic-network-2000

IDELIANCE: Personal Memory + “Intelligence Amplifier “

Mid 90's: sadness that AI languages disappear from education

2003: Semantic Networks is a too complex formalism for people; 99% reject it

2003: Idea of LITTERATUS CALCULUS: use plain natural language to represent knowledge

LITTERATUS CALCULUS: express anything with "inferons": minimal and autonomous sentences in natural language

2001 +: Strong critique of Semantic Web à la W3C

Structured vs Unstructured

Unstructured is in fact HYPER-structured

Structured is in fact HYPO-structured

Natural Language is HYPER-structured

Natural language structures are so complex that we do not know how our brain master them

So-called structured information (databases, RDF triples) are trivial structures

to match computer limitations

All the problem of KR is that we are not able to write programs which understand natural language

Semantic Networks is a good compromise between man and machine

Semantic Networks were used already in the 16th Century to represent complex information

Semantic Networks are readable by humans if small enough (Not billions of triples, leave it to NoSQL! )

Semantic Networks is a 2D representation

2D representation avoids the usage of variables as in formal logic

IDELIANCE Semantic Network editor: experience since 1993

Used by many NON CS professionals in large corporation

99% of people are reluctant to write themselves semantic networks

Use semantic networks with a Subject Verb Complement (SVC) paradigm

Let people use natural language to name S, V, C (never RDF, "Resources", URI ...)

Let people write "SVC on SVC" using a 4th ID field (NOT contexts, named graphs ...) (SVCI

format):

Please users, not standardization committees

Negative effects of the Web and Semantic Web on KR

Is Semantic Web a bad Joke ?

SW 2001: "Machines understand and help Humans" (Scientific American Paper)

SW 2006: "A machine-to-machine Web of data"

SW 2011: Linked Data: "Humans help Machines"

SW 2016: ????

An endless loop / ping-pong of failures between manual and automatic, structured and unstructured

Notion of URI is just a physical address scheme without any natural support

The Web reinforces the notion of -long- document

RDF has no "human face"

RDF is at best low level engineering and exchange format

Structured data publishing -dbpedia, Google- do not follow SW standards

Ontologies are too simplistic at RDF level

Ontologies are too complex at DL level

What was difficult to solve in the 90's with powerful KR languages on limited problems

cannot be solved in the 2010's with just Java and RDF at the Web scale

What we have to do is to install a good KR on the Internet, rethinking all the KM issues

The best -only- KR available is natural language

Natural Language does not imply "Document"

Natural Language does not mean "non -structured"

Représentation 1

A good KRL should be enjoyed by people

People should write, query, compute themselves with their KRL

Example of personal objective: take my reading notes directly in a KRL

Parabola of the ship inside the bottle: Knowledge must be cut into articulated small parts

Example of personal objective:

Summarize "Cours de Linguistique Générale" of Ferdinand de Saussure with my KRL

Tools are important! Never say "This is just a tool".

Intelligence is just a tool ... ????

Natural Language is just a tool ... ???

Many people say "Computer is just a tool" AND "Computers will change everything" …

Theory

Theory of the two black holes

Man-machine compromise schema

A good KR should be targeted at killing applications (App-Killer and not Killer App!)

Applications hide all knowledge: they presents users with a closed, limited, repressive view of the world

Replace applications by the way people will interact and compute with knowledge

A good KR should be targeted at killing the Document paradigm

Document paradigm is a concept imposed by the technology of "volumen' and "codex" more

than 2000 years ago

A good KR should aim at revolutionizing the Web (what else ?)

Representation 2

People should enjoy using themselves directly KR

People should write KR instead of writing documents

Computations on KR done directly by users should replace applications exactly as EXCEL does with numeric data

KR should be the backbone of "Semantic EXCEL" and "Semantic PowerPoint"

Collective KM fails if it is not grounded in personal KM, through a personal, intensive effort

to write, read, retrieve, combine, compute knowledge with a good KR

We must invent new ways of browsing, editing, computing on knowledge.

Examples of new computations: "In between", "novelty detection", "how to", "what looks like" , "online graph mining"...

How to proceed towards a good KR ?

Issue: what else do we have than KR progress to improve information systems ?

We must abandon the paradigm of PRO-GRAMMING

PRO-GRAMMING means “WRITTEN BY ADVANCE”

We most practice IM-PRO-GRAMMING

IM-PRO-GRAMMING means IM-PRO-VE

IM-PRO-GRAMMING means IM-PRO-VISE

IM-PRO-GRAMMING needs the appropriate KR paradigm

LITTERATUS CALCULUS

The only thing you put in a computer is sentences in natural language

INFERON: minimal and autonomous sentence

Every information is INFERON

There are no entities

Entities emerge from sentences

Instead of “Sentences are built from entities”

Many tools to manage inferons: editing, browsing, query, inference, ...

My personal KB has today 70 000 inferons

A first version of a Litteratus Calculus tool is being implemented (since 2003 …)

Current work: how to install INFERONS on the Internet ?