Re: semantics of daml:equivalentTo [was: Comments on Annotated DAML 1.6]

While I'm not a details guy like Dan, I thought the definition of 
equivalency was a simple one (i.e. not actually equality) -- I 
thought we were striving for essentially "macro" like replacement -- 
i.e. if (equiv XXX YYY) then it should mean replacing XX with YYY 
leaves meaning unchanged.  This may seem silly, but consider it where 
one ontology has something called "automobile" and another has 
something called "car" -- I may want some agent to know it can map 
between these two so I would want to be able to assert that 
ontology1:autombile is equivalent to ontology2:car.  Jeff Heflin and 
Sean Luke introduced this to the SHOE language, and it was quite 
useful (and they can correct me if I haven't explained it well) -- 
Jeff's versioning work (see the SHOE web page) also uses this.
  -Jim H.


Dr. James Hendler		jhendler@darpa.mil
Chief Scientist, DARPA/ISO	703-696-2238 (phone)
3701 N. Fairfax Dr.		703-696-2201 (Fax)
Arlington, VA 22203		http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler

Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2000 09:38:23 UTC