Re: ISSUE-126 (Revisit Datatypes): A new proposal for the real <-> float <-> double conundrum

On 4 Jul 2008, at 17:38, Bijan Parsia wrote:

> On 4 Jul 2008, at 16:08, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
>> As I've mentioned, I've done some prospecting on his issue with  
>> people who would be users of this feature. They considered the  
>> counting/discreteness issue completely uninteresting "Why would  
>> anyone want to do that?".
>
> I'm not sure what the take away here is supposed to be. I presume  
> they've never had to consider the problem before. I find that many  
> users don't have a clear grasp of how they might use a feature  
> (this cuts both ways, of course). With computational numerical  
> methods, I think its especially important to be cautious in  
> innovating. It's fairly difficult to predict the effects.
[snip]

Sorry, that wasn't entirely clear. The response "Why would anyone  
want to do that" doesn't indicate to me that there are no sensible  
use cases, but that those users are facing novel functionality. (I'd  
be happy to talk with these people.) Clearly, in general, one doesn't  
*want* to force an interaction between a finite type and counting  
quantifiers, per se. The issue is "what happens in ontologies that  
make aggressive use of finite types and counting quantifiers"? "What  
behaviors do we expect and want?" Given that there is a continuous  
floating point type available, I think it's not unreasonable to stick  
to the semantics of the type. If people *want* a continuous type with  
the funky constants, then we should define a new one. Hacking at the  
meaning of computational types is not something I feel comfortable  
without pretty close consultation with a numerical methods expert (I  
am but and interested dabbler), and even there, we'd have to make  
sure they understood OWL well enough.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Friday, 4 July 2008 17:00:28 UTC