I haven't held any hangouts online for years, although I'd consider restarting them if there is interest.
We do have a monthly call of miniKanren/OCanren researchers from around the world, where someone presents on their research. If you are interested, please send me an email!
IIRC, Dan told me that a million years ago, when they were choosing a name for the Kanren sourceforge repo, they had to use a name with a word that was sufficiently prominent on the internet. Kanren worked because there were enough hits for KanREN.
Alas, you'd still need the knowledge graphs. I hope the licensing issues for at least some of the KGs will be resolved soon. It's a tricky issue. Even some of the ontologies and controlled vocabularies in biomedicine can't be released publicly due to copyright restrictions (for example, full SemMedDB uses UMLS which uses SNOMED).
mediKanren's source code is under MIT license, and is on GitHub. Alas, the knowledge graphs we use for mediKanren aren't produced by us, and often have very complex licenses (one KG might include knowledge from 80 or 100 databases, each with a different license). As a result, we can't just release the KGs that are needed to actually use mediKanren. Also, creating high-quality queries that take into account all the nuances and quirks of the KGs is tricky, and changes as the KGs and the Biolink standard evolve. As a result, mediKanren requires some expertise to use effectively, along with access to the KGs.
An application that uses mediKanren as a back-end (along with other reasoners) is the NIH NCATS Biomedical Data Translator:
Please keep in mind that both Translator and mediKanren are designed for researchers and for biomedical research, not for patient care or treatment recommendations.
It's surprisingly reassuring to realize it wasn't actually my fault that I couldn't figure it out. Thanks for explaining! I'll look into Translator and see if I can get anywhere that way.
The main problem is likely that many programmers aren’t familiar with Scheme, or any kind of Lisp. So the material is presented in the context of a host language that itself requires substantial effort to really get used to.
Personally, while I did some Lisp back in university and was reasonably conversant in it at the time, nowadays whenever something nontrivial is presented in Lisp, it’s just too much mental overhead to get back into it, in addition to trying to understand the thing that is being presented.
Terminology like “logic variable” also needs to be explained, if you want to address an audience that isn’t already familiar with logic programming.
One of the hopes is that you can drop in your favorite host language's syntax and get a working implementation. What's your usual language stack these days?
I think the initial surface look makes scheme give a bit of an 'oh crap' response. But since minikanren is actually a small program and scheme doesn't really have syntax the language should be less of a problem than initial concerns might make one think. Grokking the actual logic in any language is going to be the bigger challenge. I guess I am trying to encourage just rolling with lisp if you can, but I totally get the initial reactions toward scheme though.
That's somewhat comforting! But on the other hand, it means also that some of the folk who would be perfectly able to understand the big idea are getting gatekept by just the look of the parentheses, even though host's concrete syntax is of little importance. Which is a darn shame.
Yes, I agree, and understand the point better. Totally a great thing if this can be made accessible to a wider audience and not expect them to do all the work to grok it, especially if there are easy/easier ways to bring it to a wider audience. The parentheses don't usually remain a problem after the initial bump, I had the same issue when I started clojure but after a short while it doesn't continue to be jarring. I think after about 90 minutes it just started to be "natural" perhaps that the wrong word, it was just something that was like ok after a bit and didn't notice too much.
Thanks Will! I think it was the microkanren paper (it's a few years ago now so i'm not 100% sure but seeing it seems familiar). I think I will try the tutorial and see if it helps make it 'click'.
