Re: What do the ontologists want

> >For me, "get rid of triples" has become shorthand for "get rid of the
> >assumption that asserting a structure of triples asserts every triple
> >in the structure."
> 
> I thought that was what you meant. I agree. In fact, I would take it 
> further and say that we should get rid of the assumption that every 
> triple is assertible. Some triples should be seen as fragments of 
> larger structures which are not even well-formed by themselves.
> 
> >I have no objection to binary predicates; I could
> >even live with all predicates being binary if it would allow me to
> >speak for lots of ontologists. :)
> 
> The restriction to binary (plus unary, ie at-most-binary) predicates 
> is mildly inconvenient but quite live-with-able, I agree. That's two 
> ontologists on the list.

I want all communication to be equivalent to passing one or more
triples.  I want to think of the knowledge held by each entity as a
set of triples (which might be modified and/or queried).

For example, I might want tell some entity that if it has the triple
<A,B,C> in its store, it should remove it.  I want to say something
like:

   there exists some triple T with a first
   element A, a second element B, and a
   third element C.  If you currently believe
   T to be true, forget that fact.

which I might do in triples like

   <T, subject, A>
   <T, predicate, B>
   <T, object, C>
   <actionRequest, Forget, T>

(I'm not suggesting this kind of "actionRequest" ontology for action
is a good approach; it's too dependent on the message context (time
and receiver identity) for my liking, but it should work for this
example.)

So is that evil reification, or is that perfectly reasonable use of
binary predicates?  

   -- sandro

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 19:42:38 UTC