Cooking: Meetings and Demo's

Today's menu was filled with meetings and discussions, all of them related to tOKo. The first meeting was with two tOKo power users, they use it to create an ontology of prepolymerisation. We discussed bugs, enhancements and philosophical and practical issues such as what should go into an ontology and what not. Two enhancements, inspired by the Cooking experiment, were much appreciated :-). There is more to come guys.

The second meeting was with Suzanne Kabel and Martijn Boosman. They are considering using tOKo in a project on capturing knowledge about emergency procedures. I demonstrated tOKo with the Chocolate and Zucchini (CZ) data loaded, and that is certainly easier to understand than prepolymerisation. For Lilia, Sigmund thinks that food processor is strongly related to almond powder, it might be right. It would be nice to work with Suzanne again.

Victor de Boer is doing a Ph.D. on ontology learning. His own blog is abandoned, but with some partners in crime he started a departmental blog (I haven't been given a password to contribute). We discussed "automatic ontology learning", based on Machine Learning techniques. Although this is an interesting research area, I wonder how many decades (centuries) it takes before such techniques become practical. The general problem is that to understand (which is necessary to create an ontology) an incredible amount of context and background knowledge is required. An example from CZ may illustrate this. You and I know that "an apple is a kind of fruit". Because CZ knows everybody knows it is not mentioned explicitly. An automated ontology learning algorithm might decide that an apple is knife. This causes little harm in practice, but when applied to emergency procedures it would be the wrong idea that if a fire breaks out your friendly ontology learning tool calls the chef. The chef, after all, uses fire only to cook.

I tried a couple of linking phrases that might support developing an ontology automatically from CZ. is a gives 265 hits, the funniest of which is:

And shopping, as you know, is a form of strenuous exercise.

Isn't language a powerful device and as you know does it: context. Do we all share CZ's conceptualisation?

Comments

[Piers]

Ha ha! Yes - very much share the shopping conception :)

[Victor]

I have sent you a request to join our h-c-blog :) and linked you via trackback.

(ps. My blog is officially not discontinued, I just kind of decided to only post Ph.D-related stuff there.. So let's say it's been continued at a reduced speed.)

[Anjo]

Piers: perhaps the concept of a CZ gem should be introduced :-).

Victor: ok, and be careful if your supervisor does not see anything on the blog for some months ...