I believe inference rules can play an extremely important role in topic
maps. I envision them mainly being used to build new associations between
topics based on certain conditions. In a genealogy topic map, for example,
you could define a rule that would infer that Bill and Sally are cousins if
one of each of their parents are siblings.
I also envision them being used to allow a system to interpret the meaning
of any association with more than 2 members in 2 roles. For example imagine
a meeting association association where Tom, Dick and Harry play the role of
attendee, San Francisco plays the role of location, "inference rules" was
the meeting subject, and 18 May 2004 plays the role of event date. While a
human could make some inferences about this meeting and other facts, a
machine cannot. Inference rules could be written to say that "[attendee]
was in [location] on [eventDate]", "[attendee] discussed [meetingSubject]
with [attendee]", and so on. Once the TMCL standard is done, it will
hopefully be possible to write inference rules based on the constraints
placed the roles and members in an association.
A couple of years ago I developed a system called SemanText
(www.semantext.com) that included a rule-based inference engine that could
do both of these things. When processing the inference rules, it added new
associations to the topic map in a special scope so that it was possible to
differentiate between supplied and inferred knowledge. It is discussed in
chapter 10 of the XML Topic Maps book along with illustrations of the
interface to building the rules. I am sad to say, however, that the
software is somewhat outdated. It was built on tmproc which was never (as
far as I know) updated to handle XTM. I also haven't updated it to the 2.x
versions of Python. I am looking at developing the next generation of the
software, though, to be built in Java on an XML database. Time is my main
limiting factor now.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: topicmapmail-admin-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:topicmapmail-admin-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
> Of Stefan Henke
> Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 5:58 AM
> To: topicmapmail-Zo64W7twoUFWk0Htik3J/w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [topicmapmail] Inference rules
>
>
> Hi,
> I have a very basic question about topic maps. Which role do
> inference rules
> play in the world of topic maps? I think in the field of
> ontologies, they
> play a quite important role. In the last time, I had a look
> at the tolog
> query language. It allows to define inference rules which are
> used for the
> query. But the rules are not getting part of the topic map
> itself. So, they
> are not used in other queries. Are there any plans to build
> in some concepts
> for inference rules in topic maps?
>
> Regards,
> Stefan
>
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