Re: summary of current position with respect to semantics proposals (was Re: WOWG: agenda Aug 15 telecon)

Ian Horrocks wrote:
>
> On August 14, Dan Connolly writes:
>
> [snip]
>
> > > Entailment 1:
> > > John in the intersection of Student and Employee
> > > entails
> > > John in the intersection of Employee and Student
>
> [snip]
>
> > > We feel that any formalism that does not support entailments like 1
> > > and 2 would manifestly fail to promote interoperability and to support
> > > the development of "applications that depend on an understanding of
> > > logical content" [3].
> >
> > Folks should keep in mind that while entailment 1 doesn't work,
> > this analog does:
> >
> >  John in the intersection of Student and Employee
> >  C is the intersection of Employee and Student
> >  entails
> > John is in C.
> >
> > and this analog is what you acutally need to deal with the
> > case where one ontology gives the intersection in one
> > order and the other does it the other way.
>
> Ontology interoperability covers (or, at least, should cover) much more
> than the above.  Among other things, it covers interactions between a
> client and a server, as follows
>
> Client: "I would like to by some furniture that is English"
>
> Server: "Sorry, can't help you - we only have English furniture"
>
> Useful, or what?
>


You make a coherent and compelling point. If I am allowed to "say anything
about anything" don't require me to say everything in double talk.

Rather it seems NOT that we can say anything about anything, indeed that we
can only say things that don't involve NOT and many uses of OR. To restrict
how we can say AND is making an already ridiculous situation downright silly
(or so this is sounding).

I have little sympathy for solutions (or semantics) that require us to say
straightforward things in a convoluted fashion -- it won't fly. It is not
the correct technical choice.

Jonathan

Received on Thursday, 15 August 2002 10:55:17 UTC