Institutions (global & local naming)

FYI re: local and global naming.  "Institutions" are a formal means to
manage name "signatures" (i.e., symbols used in formal systems).
Perhaps that is relevant to the ongoing discussion?

See: <http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/projs/inst.html>. Quoting from that site:
"Institutions have also been applied to the semantics of databases and ontologies, 
e.g. for the semantic web. Here the main contribution of institutions is to 
formalize the notion of translation from one logic to another in such as way as to 
preserve truth, and to provide a number of basic results about such translations, 
such as when they preserve the modular structure of an ontology; see Data, Schema, 
Ontology, and Logic Integration."

Institutions applied to interoperability of logics is specifically addressed in
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/lisbon04.pdf.

-hak
-- 
Hassan Aït-Kaci
ILOG, Inc. - Product Division R&D
tel/fax: +1 (604) 930-5603 - email: hak @ ilog . com