Subject: Epiphany

From: "skorgu <[email-masked]>" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 09:20:48 -0000

Hi, you don't know me and this is only peripherally, but keep reading
anyway. My name is Patrick and I'm a newcomer to lojban. As such, I
really don't have a comprehensive grasp of the language but I think I
understand most of the fundamental concepts of the language. What
excites me most about it is the ability to unambiguously state
relationships and the implications of those relationships.

Clearly this is important in conversation, but it is even more
important in relating to computers. Bear with me, I know this has
been said but its going somewhere.

Basically, while I was browsing around randomly, I stumbled across
something called DAML+OIL which is essentially an effort to create a
gigantic relationship-table. Using it you can recreate some or all of
the possible relationships in the human experience. Already I was
thinking of its application to lojban, after all what better way to
bridge the human computer gap than if both sides are unambiguous.

Then I read about N3. N3 is an alternative formulation of DAML+OIL,
and six lines into the introduction to it
(http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer.html) my jaw fell clean out of
my skull. The formulation is identical to lojban, if its grammar is
simplified. It uses selbri and sumti, and just calls bridi triplets.
I highly suggest that anyone interested in machine-human interfaces
read the DAML+OIL documents
(http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler/sciam/walkthru.html) and
especially the N3 pages. 

This is very exciting to me. I can clearly envision a simple
correspondance table linking various DAML identities to their lojban
counterparts. In short, I think this is how true human computer
interfaces could be designed. Why bother parsing a natural language
and guessing when you can be precise?

I hope someone reads this and can take the next step: fiddling with
the DAML/N3 namespaces and seeing how close they really are to lojban,
then making the two talk (so much easier said than done)

--Patrick