Ternary Entities

ABSTRACT: This short paper considers the posibility of defining entities on
an ontology
using three aspects of them, called Names, Types and Values with their
corresponding
class / instance mappings from the field of OO modeling.

Let's begin thinking that there should be three comprising parts defining
entities in our
ontology. And for this parts, let's have the standard class / instance
correlation but, 
using the same elements, mapped as follows, like classes / instances. So
there should be
that the:

Class of a Value = Type
Class of a Type = Name
Class of a Name = Value

Instance of a Name = Type
Instance of a Type = Value
Instance of a Value = Name

And, like the following drawing would represent, these parts assemble each
other conforming,
recursively, the rest of the other parts:

http://www.nabble.com/file/p15460474/a.png 

A Value reifies a Name and a Type. A Name reifies a Type and a Value. a Type
reifies a Value and a Name.
And a Value has a Name and a Type, a Name has a Type and a Value, a Type has
a Value and a Type, whose

instances could be others than the reifiers, or the same, with a 'this'
reference.
For example. Considering the concept of a Person's age, whose type is of
integer type. The Value '26', of Name 'age', of type 'Person.age' (as a
class), reifies the individual Persons whose age is of 26 years. And,
considering a inheritance hiearchy where Value is the base class, Type is
the subclass of Value and Name is the subclass of Type, then the (as an
instance) Value of and individual Person (Type as an instance) of such Name,
reifies all of the atributes and properties of the Person's Type (as a
class).

Recursively applying the pattern where a Value reifies Names, Types, who, in
turn, reifies other Types, Values and Names, should bring, defining
separately, Classes and Instances, which are special cases of clases, where
an Instance class can be another class class, or meta-class, or another
class be the instance of a class, up-down and bottom-up capabilities to
model complex structures with enough simple interfaces.

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Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2008 17:42:45 UTC