RE: What do the ontologists want

From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@mediaone.net]
> pat hayes wrote:
> 
> > Can you (or anyone) say why the ability to quote is considered a
> > practical necessity? From where I am standing it seems an arcane and
> > exotic ability, not one that is of central practical 
> > importance. What
> > is the practical utility of being able to refer to a predicate,
> > rather than use it?
> 
> 
> What is arcane or exotic about the ability to say:
> 'Jon says "The sky is blue."' ?

I'd also suggest that practical reasoning systems might want the ability to
record provenance of statements (statedBy, statedOn, source), context
(isTrueIn), explanation (hasProof, hasJustification), uncertainty
(withProbability) or counter-arguments (refutedBy).  What I expect is that,
while any given reasoning system will have its own optimised storage and
processing schemes for such information, the ability to exchange data
between reasoning systems will be based on sharing a common interlingua.  If
a facility like quoting could be defined in a logically sound and robust
way, it would provide a straightforward, uniform and extensible mechanism to
represent many such meta-level statements.  So I could take that mechanism
and, without any extension of the syntax, use it to represent in the
interlingua, say, assumption labels from a TMS for my statements.

Cheers,
Ian

_______________________________________________________________________
Ian J. Dickinson    HP Labs, Bristol, UK    mailto:Ian_Dickinson@hp.com

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 04:54:20 UTC