Disqus - Latest Comments for kendall

Re: Another Jesus Quote You’ll Never Hear in Church

kendall — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:36:41 -0000

So these arguments are what we might call arguments for moral atheism; that is, if there is such an entity as described in the Christian scriptures, that entity is not worth our respect, adoration, devotion, or even acknowledgement, since that entity is, by our lights, a moral monster.

In that sense, there is a difference between this kind of argument -- which is VERY old, advanced as early as Origen (185-254, CE) who decided to interpret scripture non-literally, i.e., allegorically, precisely because it was horrid to attribute such awful things to god -- and more abstract or conceptual arguments based on, say, metaphysical parsimony (i.e., we don't need anything like a god-claim to make sense of the world, etc).

I don't know which kind is more cognitively compelling to people, but I know which one more deeply perturbs religious believers. When asked about atheism, I usually offer a two-pronged approach: first, I don't need any god-claim to make sense of the world, so it just doesn't come up for me; and, second, even if it did come up, I would only have scorn & contempt for any such entity as depicted in Christian scriptures.

That said, I mostly just ignore those questions these days because it's all become quite tedious and boring.

Re: Yes We Can? Yes We Did!

kendall — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:20:45 -0000

Small update: the rate that housing in DC is going for Obama's upcoming inauguration, I think we can massively capitalize C&P by renting out the office for the week! I've seen rates that are, frankly, astounding, but I guess that's what happens when as many as 4 million (!) people come to DC for the historic event. For comparison, the last Bush inauguration had a crowd of about 150,000 (National Park Service estimate). That's inflation!

Re: Yes We Can? Yes We Did!

kendall — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:19:16 -0000

I appreciate how difficult that must have been for you, Jim, and I agree that "woohoo" is exactly how I felt too! :>

Re: Pellet 2.0 RC3

kendall — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:27:33 -0000

Testing Disqus, again... Hopefully it works out this time.

Re: Pellet 2.0 RC1 Release Annoucement

kendall — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:31:27 -0000

It's still there, but integrated into the command-line client:

[k@k-desktop dist]$ ./pellet.sh dig
INFO [main] (HttpServer.java:729) - Version Jetty/5.1.5rc1
INFO [main] (Container.java:74) - Started HttpContext[/,/]
INFO [main] (SocketListener.java:204) - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:8081
INFO [main] (Container.java:74) - Started org.mortbay.http.HttpServer@33c282a1

PelletDIGServer Version 20081027 (October 27 2008)
Port: 8081

See "pellet.sh help" for more subcommands, including dig, and "pellet.sh help dig" for DIG args & options.

Re: 3 Strange Startup Ideas

kendall — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:20:36 -0000

No, I'm talking about this: http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html

Re: A Week in Den Haag

kendall — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:19:34 -0000

I'm not sure which word she was using ("gamboa" is my phonetic rendering of my memory of what she said), but I do know that what was on my plate were ordinary shrimp; we don't really use the word "prawn" that much in food vocabulary in American English. :>

Re: Pronto 0.2 Release

kendall — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:04:30 -0000

Trying disqus.com for comment outsourcing again, since it seems to be much improved.

Re: Why Reasoning Matters: Explanations (3)

kendall — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:31:44 -0000

Valentin, you make a fair point. I probably wouldn't put it just that way in some other contexts, though I think's it a defensible claim. We might need to say "new knowledge relative to existing set of beliefs". It's certainly the case in bioinformatics that previously unknown knowledge was discovered using deductive reasoning. I think that counts as "new knowledge" or close enough.

Re: Why Reasoning Matters: Explanations (3)

kendall — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:47:32 -0000

In the talk I point out that both the traditional logic view and the more “small ontologies near the data” view are producing ROI, and the key is to figure out the appropriate things to use for the applications you are building.

Indeed, this is a matter of engineering tradeoffs and requirements analysis -- boring, sure, but true nonetheless. I thought I'd said this clearly in the piece.

Re: the utility of small-o approach--see, I read yr slides right after SemTech!--we've built two production systems for NASA that do exactly that. Customers are happy with those systems, which we built vastly cheaper than off-the-shelf stuff was going to cost. Yay for ROI!

We also develop a Linked Data Browser, jSpace (which Linked Data people ignore since, I suppose, it's not *also* a web browser), so we really do understand that stuff.

As to the rest of yr objections, I take them to come down to style, where tastes and opinions diverge. Our mileages, as they say, obviously vary! :)

Re: Why Reasoning Matters: It’s Not What You Know… (2)

kendall — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:50:57 -0000

Hmm, at first I just thought this was well-written blog spam, but now I've decided that it isn't. But I *still* have no idea what yr point is. I'm not sure what I said, if anything, that would cause you to think about download speeds or software sizes! :>

Re: Owlgres: A Scalable OWL Reasoner

kendall — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:51:32 -0000

Olivier,

I can't speak for the other projects, but Owlgres isn't Postgres-specific or even tied to Postgres. We developed it with Postgres in mind, but we don't any Postgres internals tweaking. Owlgres exists purely at the JDBC level, except for database-specific setup code.

So we could easily make Owlgres work for Oracle or DB2, and probably will do so at some point.

To get the *most* performance, one might tweak some DB internals (which is one reason we *prefer* Postgres), but so far that's not been necessary.

Re: Why Reasoning Matters: Consistency Checking (1)

kendall — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:16:58 -0000

I assume you meant "including" rather than "excluding" in the sentence.

Generally, I think identifying different data "facets" -- for lack of a better term -- and producing ontologies, or versions of an ontology, for each facet seems reasonable. It reminds me of the best practice from XML Land, where it's often said that a really complex apps needs several schemas.

The real trick is doing something clever in various reasoning systems to support this kind of faceted work.

Since Owlgres, in particular for us, is considerably less expressive but more scalable, one might build a more maximal ontology to check consistency but something more minimal (or none at all) to do query. Sure.

Ideally this process could be at least semi-automated; but I'm not familiar with any work in this area, though more well-informed folks might know otherwise.

Re: Why Reasoning Matters: Consistency Checking (1)

kendall — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:20:12 -0000

Hi John...My next post in this series will be about how explanation -- as a reasoning service -- provides all sorts of real-world benefits, including, as you point out, providing quite good "debugging hints" when you find problems in data.

I will also be hammering the relative advantage OWL has in this regard over RDF and RDFS, which both are so weak that no explanations are ever useful because no RDF/RDFS inferences are ever useful (Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but still...)

Re: Venture Capital Alternatives: SBIR

kendall — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:16:46 -0000

Hi Dorai,

1. Yes, as I said, I think all bootstrappers really should be "generating revenue streams" from day one. We have been profitable since the very first day, which means we've grown slowly, of course, but that's okay.

2. I don't *think* SBIRs are as hard to get as VC funding, but, as I said, I don't know this for certain. Some data would be nice.

3. Re: yr 2nd point, there are lots of SBIR experts, analysts, and much of the data is public record. But I don't know of anything really bite-sized and convenient.

4. Re: allocation -- as with most things in the US govt, the military gets the lion's share. NIH's SBIRs are the largest in terms of funding.

Re: US Politics and Europeans

kendall — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:20:53 -0000

Kjetil: We *do* only have two political parties at all levels; actually, we only have one. On nearly every issue, there really isn't that much difference between the average Republic and the average Democrat.

There are, nominally, both libertarians and Greens in the US, and they both have some local office holders; but not in numbers that are politically significant.

Re: Owlgres 0.1: First Release

kendall — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:45:17 -0000

The download comes with some sample data, and we've been using Wikipedia infoboxes -- around 23M triples -- for development.

We will put up a public endpoint for people to play with after the 0.2 release, when we support more of (non-inference) SPARQL.

That said, if you have a working Java toolchain and Postgresql (or Derby), it's pretty trivial to download, configure, and play with via the included command-line tools.

Re: Command Line Renaissance

kendall — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:45:28 -0000

Ah, yes. Funny. At least it was *several* 5 year olds who'd be required to beat me up -- I think 1 or 2 particularly tough ones could take you easily! :>

Re: Command Line Renaissance

kendall — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:16:17 -0000

WTF are you talking about?! :>

Re: Maybe this is stupid, but…

kendall — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:54:15 -0000

That's pretty funny!

Re: GRDDL in OwlSight

kendall — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:04:41 -0000

We're trying out a new 3rd party comment system, disqus.com, which may prove to be a bit more disgust.com...Anyway, it's an experiment, so let me know if you hate it and why.

Re: “OWL 2″ is the Next Version of the Web Ontology Language

kendall — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:08:50 -0000

Hi John,

Actually the next version will just be called "OWL 2", not "OWL 2.0". And it's not that OWL 1.1 has been relabelled. It's just that OWL 1.1 is the name of the OWLED-produced set of documents that were submitted to W3C to kick-start the OWL WG. They will always be called "OWL 1.1".

Pellet 1.5.1 supports OWL 1.1.

But the next version of the standard, blessed by W3C eventually, will be called "OWL 2". Some future version of Pellet will support that.

Re: Owlgres: A Scalable OWL Reasoner

kendall — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:24:24 -0000

John,

There will be a first public release soonish; we'll be giving demos at OWLED next week, and I think some Ordnance Survey folks will be there. After that, we'll make a public release.

Re: Slickmantic Web

kendall — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:13:29 -0000

The photos were cool, especially since I scanned some of them from old books. Oh, well... :>