thoughts from FOSDEM, status

[Kévin Ottens]

Le Dimanche 20 Mars 2005 00:15, Scott Wheeler a écrit :
> *) Mindshare is growing a bit, in a way that I'm mostly happy with.  Most
> people aren't really sure what it is that we're working on, but they know
> that it's supposed to be cool.

Ah-ah! I'm not so lost in fact! =)

> That's a good thing, since I think 
> explaining some of the ideas is a bit tough when you can't sit people down
> for an hour and go through the details, and "it's supposed to be cool" is
> probably better than random misinformation.

I hope we'll be able to sit around the end of august this year. ;-)
*hint* Malaga *hint*

> *) One of the more interesting questions was from Sevtap -- and I thought
> it's something that Kévin would find interesting given his research in
> multi-agent systems.  Kévin and I talked a bit about this right after
> FOSDEM, but it's worth repeating here:
>
>   Essentially Sevtap's question (and feel free to correct me) was along the
>   lines of, "Why not move the query logic into applications rather than a
>   central place?"  Essentially querying the applications as "agents" and
>   having them return things as such.

Where he's right, is that it'll be far easier to design the logic for each 
application... you basically need a set of protocols if you use something 
agent-based.

With something more centralized it'll be more more difficult to have something 
well designed and working in all cases... And what happens when a new 
application arrive? etc.

> I'm not sure that it's a practical approach, but it's certainly an
> interesting way of looking at the problem, so it's worth thinking about. 

The biggest problem I could see with such an approach is performance, it'll 
involve more active objects (even if you can cheat at the implementation 
level)... Moreover, when you cross this line it becomes difficult to see 
things as really deterministic.

> Practically speaking there's the problem that the applications not running
> all of the time, but Kévin kind of jumped to the idea of applications
> having parallel "agents" that come from the application.

I see it more as a split between a frontend and a backend... The agent being 
able to query the backend and the frontend being a good old GUI application 
for the user.

> From my side -- 
> independent of how these are organized this led to the idea that it
> probably makes sense to have plugins that can come from applications for
> query logic, much in the same way that KFileMetaInfo can abstract away
> retrieval logic.

Indeed, that seems to be a fair way of thinking. Just note that you'll start 
to build agents as soon as you'll need them to be proactive.

>  The more I learn about RDF the more I tend to believe those
> that told me that it wasn't really all that useful for KLink like
> structures, but "somebody else told me it's irrelevant" is hardly
> convincing when you're fielding questions after a talk.

Hmmm... sorry I'm not sure to understand what you mean here?
I really feel that my english is limited sometimes... :-/

> *) Ontology Learning for the Semantic Web
> -- again, recommended by Kévin -- 

Sssshh! Stop putting my name all the time like this... :-p
I prefer to be on the "not public" side of things. ;-)

> who seems to be our resident academic on these topics.  I think the point
> is mostly on building "bottom-up" ontologies rather than "top-down"
> ontologies. Or something like that.

Yes that's the point. You can find mixed approaches too : bootstrapping the 
system with a small "general" ontology, or trying to reuse an ontology. I 
don't remember if Maedche focuses his book only on bottom-up or refers to 
mixed too.

> I'm not that far into it yet as it's 
> rather slow reading for someone not already involved in the field.

Oh sorry... I thought it would be a good book as a start... :-/

> *) Essentials of Cognitive Psychology -- this hasn't actually arrived yet,
> but should shortly.  Since I'll be travelling a lot in the next couple of
> weeks that means lots of reading time and I'd like to pick up a bit on
> basically how people remember stuff as I think that may be useful down the
> line.

Indeed, and it could be important on the human interface level too... Very 
difficult topic though.

Ok, that's enough for this evening... I'm not even sure to be understandable 
anyway. :-)

Regards.
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."