Re: Information resources?

Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM> writes:

> / ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson) was heard to say:
> | Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM> writes:

. . .

> | This seems to me the crux -- on what basis do you assert they are
> | inconsistent?
>
> I'm appealing to your experience. Given two assertions:
>
>   http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "Hoary Marmot"
>   http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "web page"
>
> Your undertanding of what it means to be a Hoary Marmot (in particular
> that all such things belong to each of the following classes of
> things: marmots, rodents, gnawing animals, placental mammals,
> eutherian mammals, mammals, vertibrates, craniates, chordates,
> animals, organisms, living things, animate things, and physical
> objects) will lead you to conclude that those assertions are
> inconsistent.

Ah, I see I had misunderstood what you were saying was inconsistent
with what.  I agree that I can see that the two assertions above are
inconsistent with one another, and I'm prepared to stipulate that with
enough OWL and inference to hand a machine could too.

What I _thought_ you had meant was that 

 http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "web page"

was _internally_ inconsistent.  I actually have come to believe that,
on the contrary, we'd be better off if we could reliably (and
automatically) conclude that

  http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "Hoary Marmot"

is internally inconsistent, but that's a subject for another and
longer posting.

ht
-- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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Received on Thursday, 9 September 2004 21:54:48 UTC