RE: pun in ontolingua KB
"Benjamin J. Kuipers" <kuipers@cs.utexas.edu>
From: "Benjamin J. Kuipers" <kuipers@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 1994 08:26:11 -0500
Message-id: <199406211326.IAA14710@archimedes.cs.utexas.edu>
To: gruber@HPP.Stanford.EDU, Doug@SURYA.CYC-WEST.MCC.COM
Cc: ontolingua@HPP.Stanford.EDU, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
In-reply-to: <9406202144.AA04078@hpp-ssc-1.Stanford.EDU.ksl> (message from Tom Gruber on Mon, 20 Jun 94 14:44:10 PDT)
Subject: RE: pun in ontolingua KB
Sender: srkb-owner@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk
Doug is right. This is a (the?) critical issue in knowledge-sharing.
Tom responds to my original comment:
> By itself, this is a minor bug in the documentation, and easily
> corrected, but ...
>
> Q: Does the bug in the automatically-generated documentation reflect
> a bug in the KB?
So this isn't a bug, it's a "feature" of our knowledge-free indexing trick
used on free text documentation.
No, it *is* a bug, except that it is not an "easily fixable error".
It's an inherent and hard-to-detect failure mode of the indexing
strategy.
Such mistakes in interpretation do NOT occur
for the formal part of the specification (e.g., the axioms and slot values).
Certainly mistakes can be introduced into the formal specification,
either manually or by some flawed automatic transformation. And
certainly we need methods for checking for such mistakes. I would bet
that such checking cannot, in principle, be complete.
So, we need (a) methods for checking as best we can, and (b) methods for
continuing to function in spite of interpretation errors.
Doug: What's your experience with this?
Ben