Re: ai without lisp

From: David Steuber (david_at_david-steuber.com)
Date: 05/22/04 

Date: 22 May 2004 00:36:16 -0400

Espen Vestre <espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> writes:

> I noticed that DFKI posted job openings on comp.ai today, and thought
> I'd had a look at what they're doing these days (Until 10 years ago I
> worked at the Comp. Linguistics department in Saarbrücken, which
> cooperated a lot with DFKI)
>
> > * 200431 - Three researchers and software engineers in the area of
> > semantic web and question answering, starting around 07/04
> > (05.05.2004, closing date 15.06.2004)
> > http://www.dfki.de/lt/job_details.php?id=200431
>
> I quote:
>
> * Information extraction
> * Linguistic analysis
> * Software technologies based on XML, RDF, OWL (e.g., Prot?g?, Jena)
> * Software development in Java
> * Machine learning
> * Ontology-based QA
> * Evaluation of QA
>
> Good grief! And this used to be a thriving lisp community!
> Is this typical for AI/Computational Linguistics research centers these
> days?
>
> (In case you think RDF means Reality Distortion Field: It doesn't.
> It means Resource Description Framework. But from what I've seen
> of RDF, I think you need an RDF to work with it :-()

This article finally prompted me to see just what the heck this
semantic web thing I've been hearing about is.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oi=defmore&q=define:semantic+web

If this isn't a job for Lisp, I don't know what is. Why is XML, RDF,
and whatever else they are contriving better suited to this task than
Lisp expressions?

Wouldn't even a Java application spend less time parsing a Lisp
expression than XML with an available library? What I'm asking here
is that Lisp looks a lot easier to parse.

And to think that XML was supposed to just be a lite weight substitute
for SGML. 

-- 
I wouldn't mind the rat race so much if it wasn't for all the damn cats.

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