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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

(causenet.org)
229 points geetee | 5 comments | 02 Sep 25 05:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.831s | source
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tgv ◴[02 Sep 25 07:42 UTC] No.45100192[source]▶
This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way to express that myxomatosis is lethal for only European rabbits, not humans, nor gold fish.
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1. SilverElfin ◴[02 Sep 25 15:05 UTC] No.45104046[source]▶
What is an ontology exactly? I see Palantir talking about it all the time and it just sounds like vague marketing.
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2. GloriousMEEPT ◴[02 Sep 25 15:28 UTC] No.45104347[source]▶
These days anyone can spin up a developer account and check it out. Near as I could tell, you can create abstract 'objects' and link them to datasets/columns in the environment. And then you can link objects together. It's basically just an ER modeling tool, but they have great sales and seemed to have convinced people that they are constructing ontologies.
3. tgv ◴[02 Sep 25 17:05 UTC] No.45105883[source]▶
It comes from "the knowledge of being," and has been used to describe real-world knowledge representation, in particular hierarchical(-ish) semantic networks in AI since its early days.
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4. SilverElfin ◴[02 Sep 25 18:47 UTC] No.45107358[source]▶
When I see Palantir talk about it in a press release is that something real or just fluffy marketing?
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5. tgv ◴[03 Sep 25 06:03 UTC] No.45112669{3}[source]▶
Could be real. Such knowledge representation has been used in many systems. In limited domains, it can be useful.