Set Theory (NBG)

I am puzzled by RDF's treatment of containers.  It seems to me that
RDF provides a way to talk about collections of objects without
requiring that collections have the semantics one normally attaches to
them.  The standard practice in mathematics is to use set theory for
that purpose, so why not restrict the models of RDF statements to
those consistent with set theory?  One could do this by allowing
reasoning systems to assume the axioms of set theory.
Von-Neumann-Bernays-Godel (NBG) set theory is well suited for this
purpose.  You can read more about NBG and mechanized mathematics in
W. M. Farmer, "STMM: A Set Theory for Mechanized Mathematics", Journal
of Automated Reasoning, 2000, Vol 26, No. 3, pp. 269-289,
http://imps.mcmaster.ca/doc/stmm.pdf.

John

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 09:24:45 UTC