Re: singleton sets

Ian--

+1 to concrete examples!  (This is why I referred to section 3.1.3 of  
the OWL Guide in a (much) earlier response.)  As you note, it's  
possible to raise questions about the need for this modeling technique  
in specific examples, but it's often useful (and natural).

--Frank

On Aug 13, 2008, at 3:20 PM, Ian Emmons wrote:

>
> Frank,
>
> Thanks for making this distinction clear -- I had a suspicion that  
> the discussion was confusing these concepts, but I skipped several  
> of the intervening messages, and I wasn't sure.
>
> This may or may not be a useful interjection, but the level of  
> abstraction in this discussion is a little high, so I thought a  
> concrete example might help.  I encountered a situation where "X   
> type  Y;  X  subClassOf  Z;" seemed to be useful.  Our application  
> modeled transportation assets, and it also drew its data from a  
> relational database.  So, we had a table of vehicles that had (in  
> the ugly manner of an RDB) a column VehicleType, which contained one  
> of an enumerated list of possible types (1 for truck, 2 for cargo  
> plane, 3 for containerized cargo ship, etc.).  Once a row from this  
> table was translated into RDF, we wanted to classify the type of  
> vehicle via an RDF class, so we created a taxonomy of vehicle  
> classes with an entry for each of the enumerated vehicle types.   
> This yields the following:
>
>    x type V;  V subClassOf Vehicle;
>
> Where things got messy was when we realized that our RDF  
> representation needed to retain the enumerated vehicle type code.   
> To do this we added the type code as a data type property of the  
> vehicle class, like so:
>
>    x type V;  V subClassOf Vehicle;  V hasTypeCode t;
>
> As we usually do, we gave the hasTypeCode property a domain  
> (EnumeratedVehicleType), and so the obvious inference yields the  
> following:
>
>    x type V;  V subClassOf Vehicle;  V hasTypeCode t;  V type  
> EnumeratedVehicleType;
>
> In particular:
>
>    V subClassOf Vehicle;  V type EnumeratedVehicleType;
>
> I'm sure we could have modeled this differently so as to eliminate  
> the subclass-and-type pattern, but this seemed to be the nicest way  
> to handle it to us.  Hopefully it's a compelling use case for this  
> discussion.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ian
>
>
>
> On Aug 13, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Frank Manola wrote:
>
> On Aug 12, 2008, at 5:05 PM, Richard H. McCullough wrote:
>
>>
>> Here's someone else who doesn't like singleton sets,
>> and hence doesn't like classes which are individuals.
>>
>> John Barwise & John Etchemendy (1992), "The Language of First-Order  
>> Logic",
>> Third Edition, Revised & Expanded, Center for the Study of Language  
>> and Information, Stanford, Page 212
>>
>> Suppose there is one and only one object x satisfying P(x).   
>> According to the
>> Axiom of Comprehension, there is a set, call it a, whose only  
>> member is x. That is,
>> a = {x}.  Some students are tempted to think that a = x..  But in  
>> that direction lies,
>> if not madness, at least dreadful confusion.  After all, a is a set  
>> (an abstract object)
>> and x might have been any object at all, say Stanford's Hoover  
>> Tower. Hoover is
>> a physical object, not a set.  So we must not confuse an object x  
>> with the set {x},
>> called the singleton set containing x.  Even if x is a set, we must  
>> not confuse it with
>> its own singleton.  For example, x might have any number of  
>> elements in it, but {x}
>> has exactly one element: x.
>>
>
>
> Whoa!  What we were originally talking about wasn't singleton sets,  
> it was the following question:
>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 2. X  type  Y;  X  subClassOf  Z;
>>>>>> Another neat property: X is an individual and a class.
>>>>>> Now I can ... What?  I don't know.
>>>>>> Why do you want to do that?
>
> Wanting to be able to treat a class X as an individual may or may  
> not be a good idea, but this isn't the same as wanting to treat a  
> singleton set as *the same* individual as its only member.  To  
> paraphrase your quotation above, in the direction of subtle subject  
> changes like this lies, if not madness, at least dreadful confusion.
>
> --Frank
>

Received on Wednesday, 13 August 2008 21:08:38 UTC