Re: vocabulary simplification: two proposals to vote on [deadline, Oct 26 midnight, GMT]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Luc Moreau <l.moreau@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> ... does imply activity? you mean agency?

Yes, sorry.

> Well, so it's simple, we can quote definition 1 which does not.

Not as simple a that. Sense 1 is a mass noun, which applied across a
composition of actors (an economy is made up of "rational" agents).
It's an imprecise term to hang on to, especially when in most cases
we're talking about sense 2, but without the guarantee of agency,
known or not.

Of the terms discussed, I would prefer "Process" with the caveat that
it needs to be strongly defined as the occurrent, not a continuent
that specifies occurrents.

I'm not clear on why "activity" was settled on as the simplest term.
The root "act" is far less ambiguous, even though it too suffers from
implied agency. Shouldn't we be opening this up to other suggestions?

For instance, we can simplify the model by making Events either
instantaneous or not (which aligns with the common definition of
Event), and let Events be composites. Temporal events can be aligned
with time.owl, but the temporal aspect shouldn't be required (as it's
not required now).

Jim
--
Jim McCusker
Programmer Analyst
Krauthammer Lab, Pathology Informatics
Yale School of Medicine
james.mccusker@yale.edu | (203) 785-6330
http://krauthammerlab.med.yale.edu

PhD Student
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
mccusj@cs.rpi.edu
http://tw.rpi.edu

Received on Thursday, 27 October 2011 01:05:37 UTC