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From: dta@organon.com (Dean T Allemang)
Subject: Loom, Ontolingua and KIF?
Message-ID: <DTA.96Feb9101122@organon.com>
Followup-To: comp.ai
Sender: news@organon.com (news)
Organization: Organon Motives, Inc.
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 15:11:22 GMT
Lines: 28


I was reading the Ontolingua pages on the web (*) and found a
reference to Loom, in which the Ontolingua page author says that
`Loom, by design, is simply not as computationally powerful as KIF'.
When I first read this, I naively thought that the designers of Loom
had simply missed the boat, and that they would do well to increase
its expressive power to keep up with things like KIF.

However, when I went to the Loom pages and read up on Loom, I was not
so sure that the situation was this simple - Loom comes with quite a
lot of processing power (e.g., the classifier and the rete), which
probably depend a lot on the semantics of the underlying

representation language, so that increasing its expressive power (say,
to be similar to that of KIF) would violate some of the assumptions on
which these things are based.

Are there any Loom experts out there who can comment on this?  Is Loom
really less expressive than KIF?  Is there a good reason for this?
Are there versions of Loom on the way that will work around whatever
problems are referred to above?

Dean Allemang
Organon Motives Inc



(*)http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledge-sharing/ontolingua/doc/release-notes.html
