Purposive without Foresight

I’m attending 11 lectures this semester, will take 9 exam in 1.5 months. None of the 11 lectures has much to do with formal logic, then why am I paying attention to logic again? Too bored by my classes and homeworks, maybe. The fact is I was reading a book Jess in Action for I found the author Dr. Ernest Friedman-Hill very interesting and he helped/mentored me on several programming problems/questions. Under the hood of the rule engine Jess, the workhorse is Rete Algorithm, in the scope of logic. Reading his book reminds me my good old days spent in the Logic lecture, with an almost idle brain when I was tired or with my mind passionately wandering in irrelevant fantasies when I was not tired.

It’s an exciting reading of the book Jess in Action. Formal logic no longer appears like illogical nonsense to me when Dr. Friedman-Hill reveals the fasicinating application possibilities and potentials of the declarative programming. I dag out my old text book on formal logic and artificial intelligence, started to read them again and things became understandable and interesting. In large-scale software systems, when the processing (state evaluation and execution) becomes complex, rule engines implementing sophisticated logic algorithms usually bring great solutions.

Two weeks ago I started to prepare for a 1.5-hour presentation on “Knowledge Management” for the recitation of the lecture “Information Management”, so I was doing a bit research on the internet. “Knowledge Management” itself is a buzz word on sites like cio.com. When it comes to technologies people usually mean things like web-based portals for collaboration: online forums, blogs, wikis, etc. However I believed technology can go a bit further than simply rendering people’s ideas on portal. Nowadays the problem is not that there lacks information but is that information is way to much to be used efficiently. Not all informations are useful/valuable/meaningful to a certain problem domain, knowledge manage systems should somehow be able to extract meaningful knowledges from immense amount of informations. Found a very readable article The Semantic Web in Ten Passages. More information can be found here: Knowledge Sharing and Integration. Horn logic lies in the core. The applications build upon Horn Logic make great sense and I believe they have a bright future.

As James C. Maxwell said “There is nothing more practical than a good theory”, the value of all the theoretical lectures in the univ. K’lautern is in fact enormous. But why didn’t I, as well as many other students, realise it while we were sitting in the classroom? Many of us believed all the very abstract concepts and deduction mechanisms were not really useful but just for tenure as computer science. I really can’t remember any of the three professors whose logic lectures I visited mentioned the application possibilities of logic or anything like “logic in the real engineering”. Always just “Satz …. Beweis …., Satz…..Beweis….”. Maybe I was too stupid to discover the value of the Satzs myself then, I was not motivated and I was not excited. Now when the real project becomes challenging, the dry theories becomes interesting to me.

Funny that prof. Harold Boley, the prime force behind the initiatives of RuleML, was teaching real applications empowered by formal logic in the same univ. when I was studying there. I never heard my instructors of Formal Logic mentioned him and his projects. I stayed there for 5 semesters but never knew there existed such a professor in my department….Thanks to today’s omniscient internet I can still learn from his web publications.