Paper
Yesterday ended up being busier than I expected. After I helped Anne and Luc get out the door, I went to town to meet a friend (Hi Brad) for a discussion on Resolvers in Kowari. This took some time, as I also discussed several other things, like my recent trip, etc. Once I get home, I went straight to UQ to meet with Bob. Again, I discussed my trip, and then got down to some of the work I should be doing now that I'm back.

Given my upcoming work, I don't expect to have a lot of time for my research degree. So Bob suggested that I should try to get a paper out of the way as soon as possible. He has a point, so I thought I'd aim for Australasian Ontology Workshop later this year. That gives me about 3 weeks to write something. Anything I write here should be a good starting point for a thesis too, so it will be useful in more ways that one.

My plan is to write about 6 way indexing of quads in RDF, and how this leads to easy constraint resolution. This then forms the basis for set-at-a-time rule operations which can then be used for OWL entailment and consistency checking (by extension of the KAON2 rule work). I'm busy tomorrow, but I'll start trying to write something on Monday.

While visiting the MIND lab, I was really impressed with the ontology debugging work in Swoop. I explained to Bob that while I expect my methods to quickly find an inconsistency, it will never provide enough information to track down complex problems in the same way that Swoop can. I thought that it might be worthwhile to use set-at-a-time processing to work with data on a larger scale, and then drop back to tableaux reasoning (or others) when a problem is discovered, so the source of the problem can be identified.

Funnily enough, Bob thought that this would be enough to write up as an MPhil thesis. I think it's funny, as I always thought Bob wanted me to do a lot more than I've been doing, and now he's suggesting that I need to do less. It's also funny, since I've always been much more interested in entailing new data quickly than in checking consistency. Consistency is important (OK, it's vital), but my purpose for this thesis has always been to entail new data efficiently. I find it ironic to be told that I don't need to do the part that I thought was more important (or more interesting).