Re: Versioning vs Temporal modeling of Patient State

On Jan 12, 2007, at 9:36 AM, dirk.colaert@agfa.com wrote:

> Recently I had an interesting conversation with Werner Cuesters,  
> professor in Bufallo and colleague of Barry Smith. He has some  
> theory about ontology maintenance and versioning and it considers  
> both "classes" and "instances". Both can change either because you  
> made en error, either you view on the world changed, either because  
> the world changed . It turns out that you can only handle changes  
> if you know for each change exactly what de reason of the change  
> was. That reason should be documented in the system.
[snip]

The standard lingo for this is that a change to the knowledge base  
due to a change in the *world* is called an *update* whereas a change  
in your knowledge base due to a change in *your knowledge* of the  
(current static) world is called a *revision*. The locus classicus  
for this, IMHO, is:
	<http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/417296.html>

Following there model theoretic accounts, there is a spate of work  
defining reasoning services that compute the updated or revisied  
knowledge base given a proposed update or revision. E.g., recently:
	<http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/~clu/papers/archive/kr06c.pdf>

The utility of model oriented revision and update for expressive  
logics is, IMHO, not fully established, though it is conceptually  
useful in my experience. There is, of course, a large chunk of work  
on revising (and even updating) belief *bases*, that is, attending  
primarily to the *asserted* set of formulae.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Friday, 12 January 2007 10:27:44 UTC