Tuesday, January 28, 2014

On automatically inducing ontologies


It would be a lot more feasable to induce ontologies if we agreed on what it meant have a good ontology.  I claim the crafting a good ontology is an AI- hard or in another words a human-hard task.  I've been a little bit surprised in the last few years of the numbers of request for proposals for the automatic induction of ontologies.  I would've much rather seen that money spent on us deciding what it meant to do good data model design.  Once we know what a good ontology is, we can properly judge attempts to automatically induce such things. But it's clear to me that the automatic induction of  ontologies is also NLP-hard :^).  And Google Translate isn't going to get us  to full natural language understanding or anything close to it.  I claim this will require handcrafted ontologies.  So the bottom line to me is that once we've completely modeled our practical world, we will be prepared to automatically induce that model :^).