- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 25 Mar 2003 01:56:49 -0600
- To: www-archive@w3.org, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: Jos De_Roo <jos.deroo@agfa.com>
Points in random order: * log:conclusion without log:includes seems to be of very limited utility. You have to be very careful to be sure the deductive closure is finite. log:concusionIncludes seems better; cwm can implement it as a composition of conclusion and includes, but documents last longer than code, and our knowledge bases should move away from using log:conclusion. I think Sandro made the analagous point about --think without --filter. Euler has no way to offer such an interface. The common interface they share is: given a list of premises, find one or more proofs of _these_ conclusions/conjectures. I think you can use a degenerate { ?S ?P ?O } to find all the simple factual conclusions. I think cwm gives up in that case, but it could probably be taught not to. Euler probably doesn't go so fast in that case. Euler would need a "don't justify the conclusion; just instantiate the variables and assert the result" mode in order to work for circles-and-arrows, travel tools, /TR/, and the like, * The proof theory literature that I've been reading treats inference rules as (computational) functions that take proofs as arguments and return proofs as results. So for example andI takes a proof of A and a proof of B and returns a proof of A /\ B: They write these using x: T notation, which you can read as "T is a proof of x" (they also tell you to read it as "x is of type T" though I find that almost superfluous). A: pfA B: pfB ======== A /\ B : andI(pfA, pfB) >From that viewpoint, rdf simple entailment is a function that takes a proof of A and returns a proof of B whenever A log:includes B. { ?PFA :proves ?A. ?A log:includes ?B } <=> { [ is :rdfSimpleEntailment of ?PFA ] :proves ?B. ?PFA :proves ?A. } * I'm starting to think our proof representation should use this functional structure, though I can't say for sure why. I haven't looked at timbl''s proof representation design closely yet. * The systems that work this way seem to be stratified. I'm not sure if that's critical to making it work at all or just an artifact of design preferences. * log:includes is one entailment relationship; log:conclusionIncludes is another; each entailment relationship has an analagous inference rule form. { ?PFA :proves ?A. ?A log:conclusionIncludes ?B } <=> { [ is :hornClauseResolution of ?PFA ] :proves ?B. ?PFA :proves ?A. } * I think Jos's research exploits the "proofs as programs" Curry-Howard isomorphism and actually provides an efficient implementation of derived inference rules once it has prooved that they follow from basic inference rules. This looks like an extremely valuable mechanism to support "diagonalization" that will be critical to keeping proof sizes manageable. * datatype literals are functional terms. Hmm... -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Tuesday, 25 March 2003 02:55:41 UTC