Re: summary of current position with respect to semantics proposals (was Re: WOWG: agenda Aug 15 telecon)

On August 14, Dan Connolly writes:

[snip]

> > Entailment 1:
> > 	John in the intersection of Student and Employee
> > 	entails
> > 	John in the intersection of Employee and Student

[snip]

> > We feel that any formalism that does not support entailments like 1
> > and 2 would manifestly fail to promote interoperability and to support
> > the development of "applications that depend on an understanding of
> > logical content" [3].
> 
> Folks should keep in mind that while entailment 1 doesn't work,
> this analog does:
> 
>  	John in the intersection of Student and Employee
>  	C is the intersection of Employee and Student
>  	entails
> 	John is in C.
> 
> and this analog is what you acutally need to deal with the
> case where one ontology gives the intersection in one
> order and the other does it the other way.

Ontology interoperability covers (or, at least, should cover) much more
than the above.  Among other things, it covers interactions between a
client and a server, as follows

Client: "I would like to by some furniture that is English"

Server: "Sorry, can't help you - we only have English furniture"

Useful, or what?

Ian