Re: DAML: About Thing, Nothing and the "universe of discourse"

> >The DAML-OIL suggestions defines Thing as the union of Nothing and the
> >complement of Nothing and stated - but does not explains why - that this
> >provide some benefits regarding semantics?
> >
> >My current perspective is from outside DAML and DL so I hope that the
> >following make sense and is not too misaligned with the proposal::
> >
> >I would like to see the ability to (on a individual basis) express which
> >nodes/classes/instances/etc are in the (current) universe (domain) of
> >discourse and which are not.
> >
> >For this one approach is to be able to specify what is "outside", for
> >which it appears that it would be a good idea to define Nothing simply
> >as the complement of Thing with the usual IC(Thing) = DD.... Than
> >individuals of Nothing would be outside the universe of discourse.
>
> In general it is always possible to take a lattice-like heirarchy
> with a top and bottom element and 'wrap' it inside a larger similar
> structure by adding a higher top and a lower bottom.  The issue here
> is whether we want to be able to give a name to what are seen as the
> global extremes, so that any subsequent additions must 'fit inside'
> these, or whether any such structure is seen as extendable to a
> larger one. Either strategy is workable, but I think the latter is
> the most useful.
>
> I would urge that Morten's suggestion be adopted, if I follow him
> correctly. The idea then would be that every DAML ontology is
> understood to be 'about' a universe of discourse, and that Nothing
> and Thing are understood as relative to that universe. This allows
> one ontology to align its universe with another by asserting that its
> Thing and Nothing are equivalent to the other ontology's , but it
> also allows an ontology to claim a larger universe of discourse by
> asserting that B#Thing is equivalent to some class name in its
> heirarchy (and B#Nothing to its complement) thus restricting all the
> relations imported from the ontology B to the appropriate class in
> its heirarchy. If this is workable, the complementarity of Thing and
> Nothing can be preserved in each ontology, even though the exact
> meanings are implicitly indexed by the ontology they occur in.
>
> Pat Hayes

Thanks to Pat Heyes for the details (good points) and the support! I would
like to clarify that my suggestion means that Nothing no longer describes the
empty set of all possible nodes/classes/instances/etc in all universes, only
the empty set with regard to a particular universe = DD (note: the the
intersection of Nothing and DD is always empty). For the always empty set
across all universes maybe "Empty" could be used... Such meanings of Thing,
Nothing (and Empty) would be much more useful (including for future uses
outside the current project scope = which is where I am from) than the
current definitions.

M. Christensen

Received on Thursday, 7 December 2000 04:56:11 UTC