- John F. Sowa
John Florian Sowa is the
computer scientist who inventedconceptual graph s, a graphic notation for logic and natural language, based on the structures insemantic network s and on theexistential graph s of Charles S. Peirce. He is currently developing high-level "ontologies" forartificial intelligence and automatednatural language understanding . International conferences on conceptual graphs have been held for over a decade since before 1992. Sowa combines ideas from numerous disciplines and eras modern and ancient, for example, applying ideas fromAristotle , the medievalScholastics toAlfred North Whitehead and including database schema theory.He spent most of his professional career at IBM and isa cofounder of VivoMind Intelligence, Inc.
In
1991 , Sowa first stated his Law of Standards: "Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an officialstandard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as ade facto standard for X." [ [http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/standard.htm Law of Standards] ] LikeGall's law , The Law of Standards is essentially an argument in favour of underspecification. Examples include:*The introduction of
PL/I resulting inCOBOL andFORTRAN becoming the de facto standards for scientific and businessprogramming
*The introduction ofAlgol-68 resulting in Pascal becoming the de facto standard for academic programming
*The introduction of the Ada language resulting in C becoming the de facto standard forDoD programming
*The introduction ofOS/2 resulting in Windows becoming the de facto standard fordesktop OS External links
* [http://www.jfsowa.com/ www.jfsowa.com/] homepage
References
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