Re: Compliance Level 1 Proposal (property vs. relation)

On Tue, 2002-05-14 at 08:30, Christopher Welty wrote:
> My only response is a general one:
> 
> Description logics had an unfortunate historical tradition to refer to 
> "relations" as "roles".  This was, I think, an accident of how DLs 
> evolved.  I was hoping we could fix this now that DLs are being presented 
> to the world.  Instead of fixing it by referring to "relations" with that 
> term, we are now using "property."  In logic, when I learned it, 
> properties are unary predicates.
> 
> If we are talking about relations, why aren't we calling them relations?

As I recall, because the OOP folks call them properties,
and there are more OOP folks in the web community
than logic folks. Or... at least there were,
around 1998, when the terminology was established.

Indeed, it's easy to find the OOP notion
of 'property' in the web with google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=property+object

object Property (OBJECT, APPLET)
... object Property. Internet Development Index. Retrieves the contained
object.
Syntax HTML, N/A. Scripting, [ oObject = ] object.object. Possible
Values ...
msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/
reference/properties/object.asp - 12k - Cached - Similar pages

: Class Client
... java.lang.Object, getPropertyObject() Returns the property object
set by the room. ... void,
setPropertyObject(java.lang.Object obj) Sets the property object. ...
www.moock.org/unity/distribution/latestrelease/
javadoc/org/moock/unity/core/Client.html - 16k - Cached - Similar pages


Of course, 'property' in the OOP sense is usually
functional, so it is somewhat odd.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 18:21:32 UTC