Adrian,
I did miss your link. If anyone else did, here it is:
www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/Marry3.agent
This is the kind of example representation that can get the discussion moving forward. Correct me if I am wrong in the following. It looks like you are using a binary or 3-place predicate Marriage(x,y,t). Presumably you have unary predicates for male, female and time. That would allow you to make assertions about Mary and John being married at a specific time. Presumably you have axioms for time. Do you have time intervals. Do you have axioms that preclude someone being married to two people at the same time. With this axiomatization there does not seem to be any concept of marriage other than the pairs of individuals which satisfy the relation. If you needed a way of identifying a specific marriage you could of course add another variable to the marriage predicate to serve as a key.
Any other suggestions from anyone as to how to give axioms for marriage? How does one bridge between this and Cory’s pictures?
Marriage was chosen as a challenge as it is probably the simplest example of a class of modeling problems which includes the detailed design description of a Boeing 747. While natural language is important one wonders if it scales to represent all of the components and connections in a large manufacture product.
Henson