RE: Restriction and rules

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for commenting my thoughts -- that was useful confirmation of some 
of my ideas.

At 16:07 04/11/03 +0100, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>Doing fancy stuff in restrictions is very hard.

Well, maybe.

What I'm trying to do isn't particularly fancy.

The restrictions approach seems to work nicely within the existing RDF 
syntactic framework.

Also, it seems to provide a more uniform approach to expressing application 
domain knowledge.  If I know a+b=c, then given any two of a,b,c I can 
deduce the third.  Using conventional rules, that takes three separate rules.

When I was working on a network device configuration application using RDF 
earlier this year, I found that I typically needed only very simple 
patterns of inference.  "A little inference goes a logn way".  What was 
missing from the tools I was trying to use was the ability to handle odd 
datatypes (notably IP addresses).  So I'm looking for ways to encode 
knowledge of datatypes in a way that applications can easily access.

I've just settled on trying an approach based on class restrictions.  I 
think it's worth experimenting with.

>Without any named variables life is tough.
>Rules languages tend to add variables.

At some level, I'm sure you're right.

But I glimpse parallels with the functional programming I've been playing 
with, and in particular a "point free" style of programming that avoids the 
use of variables.  It takes some getting used to, but often results in very 
elegant expressions.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2003 12:26:11 UTC