Re: Doug Lenat's THE BIG PICTURE

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Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 16:31:04 +0059 (EDT)
From: Sam Hunting <sgmlsh@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Doug Lenat's THE BIG PICTURE
To: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@west.poly.edu>
Cc: cg@cs.umn.edu, hovy@isi.edu, lenat@cyc.com, srkb@cs.umbc.edu,
        doug@csi.uottawa.ca, fritz@rodin.wustl.edu
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> Although it's important to put content into our programs, it's also
> essential to put it in a usable form.  We already have tons of machine
> readable dictionaries, thesauruses, and enormous volumes of source text.
> There is a lot that can be done with them, and to quote Leibniz again,
> "those who have laid out all sorts of notions under certain headings or
> categories have done something very useful."  But these things would be
> even more useful if they were put in a common form that was suitable
> for something more sophisticated than spelling checkers.

Isn't that one of the things that SGML (Standard Generalized Markup 
Language, ISO 8879) would be useful for? That is, putting content into 
useful, machine-readable, common forms usable by sophisticated 
application software.


I'm not sure whether there is no relationship between the knowledge
representation community and the SGML community, or there was once and it
schismed, or whether both communities decided their respective tasks were
unrelated, or what. Can anyone shed any light?