Re: Question about ontology

 

>> With reference to earilier note, Pouring is short for
"PouringThings", a tag that may be transiently attachable to anything
(to any subject) that is "in" the state of being-poured. This last
assertion mimics pretty well how we generally think about these things
>

> My dear fellow, speak for yourself. I certainly don't think of
pouring as a tag that is transiently attached to a thing. For a start,
you can't pour a thing, only a piece of liquid (more generally, fluid)
substance.

JMC: Yes that's what I had in mind - it's attached for a
time to the liquid thing that has been said 'part of' a full-bottle, to
indicate its current state. This tag's as much a 'switch' in practice as
anything else -- what would you propose, a boolean pouring property? I
state the tag pretty simply: _rdf:Description_ is:now s_mw:Category,
_where _smw:_Category subClassOf owl:Class and is:now subPropertyOf
rdf:type. One purpose of this "is:now" property is to compartmentalize
these so-called tags from all other classes for fundamental types of
things, for two reasons. First, it simplifies semantic applications like
wikis and second, it neatly integrates what might be called "facets" (a
refinement of OOP somehwat drowned out by semantic web exceitment,
back-when). Anyway, 'pouring' is a facet attached for a time via the
"is:now" property, before it's then moved to a "was:now" property for
the liquid. 

Anyway you can see my general formulation for predicate
properties is for one namespace, whose prefix is "is", contains the
definition for a "now" ObjectProperty in the present tense, while
another namespace, whose prefix is "was", contains the definition for a
"now" ObjectProperty in the past tense. 

My problem though with this
arrangement is that a given property does not allow pairs of
range-domain statements. For instance today I can specify that
property:x is valid only for a set of ranges and for a set of domains;
there's no way I know of to specify a set of pairs of ranges/domains,
Any ideas about this? 

thanks - john