On Mar 29, 2012, at 6:32 AM, Stian Soiland-Reyes wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 27, 2012, Graham Klyne wrote:
>
> Personally, I prefer the choice that it is reflexive; i.e. specializationOf(a,a) always holds. As I recall, that seems to simplify some other inferential machinery.
>
> Yes, it solves the turtles-all-the-way problem last highlighted by Tim in this thread, if we also made specializationOf(x,y) imply alternativeOf(x,y), as the unknown top-level y can be specializationOf itself. However I think we dismissed the need for such an inference.
>
> Intuitively it sounds confusing to be an alternative to yourself, or a specialisation of yourself, but as we see above there could be special cases where you would want (a subproperty of) specializationOf/alternativeOf to be reflective, so I would simply say +1 for the conservative say-nothing approach for reflexivity.
+1
-Tim
>
> --
> Stian Soiland-Reyes
>
>
> --
> Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
> School of Computer Science
> The University of Manchester