Conditionals :revisited

>
> Hi All,
>
> I am reading up the threads on Conditionals started by Terry and 
> carried on by Sheila. Here, I am referring to the Congo Example for 
> some details regarding these threads. Excuse me, if I bring out 
> already discussed issues.
>
> In ExpressCongoBuy we have two output properties:
> 1.congoOrderShippedOutput - condition :BookInStock
> 2. congoOutOfStockOutput - condition :BookOutStock
>
> It is intutive that only one of these two would be true, however, 
> nowhere is it specified that only one of these two would be outputted 
> by service.  Should we not have something like this:
>
> <daml:disjointUnionOf rdf:parseType="Collection">
>    <daml:Class rdf:about="#congoOrderShippedOutput"/>
>    <daml:Class rdf:about="#congoOutOfStockOutput"/>
>  </daml:disjointUnionOf>
>
> Further, I am wondering why do we have two conditions, when we 
> actually just need one. Is it possible to reduce this to something like :
>
> if(BookInStock)
>    congoOrderShippedOutput
> else
>    congoOutOfStockOutput
>
> (I am not too sure about the current scenario however when we do 
> express conditions as logical formalism this can be a possibility )
>
> Sheila , correct me if I am wrong, however my interpretation from one 
> of your emails was that in DAML-S we only need to specify the 
> different outputs a service can generate and the conditions under 
> which those outputs would be generated. We do not need to specify 
> which condition needs to be true to generate a particular output. 
> However somehow I feel that it is necessary to expose this aspect of 
> the control flow in the ontology itself as it gives the service 
> seeking agent apriori knowledge of what to expect from a service and 
> consequently to decide whether to go ahead with service execution. In 
> the current representation, I think, for a process we have all the 
> conditional properties bundled together without any notion of which 
> properties would be true for a particular execution trace (I may be 
> wrong here.....) . With the changes from PAC to PAI it might be an 
> idea to include this as part of the trace ontology.
>
> I would really appreciate more input from other members to help me 
> clear my ideas on this issue.
>
> Thanks & Regards,
>
> Monika


-- 
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Monika Solanki
Software Technology Research Laboratory(STRL)
De Montfort University
Hawthorn building, H00.18
The Gateway
Leicester LE1 9BH, UK

phone: +44 (0)116 250 6170 intern: 6170
email: monika@dmu.ac.uk
web: http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~monika
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Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2003 08:35:40 UTC