I am not sure we are making the same argument here (i think so)
but yes - (01)
in the same way that in an E/R diagram, the relation must be a verb
and the entity a noun (afaik) its kind of a rule, (02)
PDM (03)
On Jan 2, 2008 1:48 PM, Patrick Cassidy <pat@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Just a little off-topic "cri de coeur" about the naming of relations:
>
> [Chris Menzel said]
> >
> > But why? "creator" in that example from the RDF documentation is
> > simply
> > short for "is the creator of", which corresponds almost exactly to the
> > definition of "predicate" that you yourself provided.
> >
>
> Actually, in that document it is short for "has creator", which has the
> opposite polarity from "is the creator of".
> This is an extremely easy-to-make misinterpretation when simple nouns are
> used to name relations: the polarity could logically be defined either way,
> and different people use it in different ways.
>
> I really, really wish people would just stop using simple nouns to express
> relations, and always use a verbal form like "isTheCreatorOf" or
> "hasCreator" or "is_the_mother_of" because when a simple noun is used there
> is time wasted trying to remember or recheck just what the intended polarity
> was, and a significant probability that it will be used incorrectly. That
> sort of usage was fine when logicians were writing papers with one or two
> example relations and one had lots of examples of that relation to burn its
> polarity into one's brain by the end of the paper. With ontologies having
> hundreds or thousands of relations and people using the same relation name
> with different polarities, we are wasting time and risking error on a
> completely unnecessary ambiguous convention.
>
> For clarity, in the examples I use to explain things, I use a simple
> modification of the KIF format, using curly braces to invert the order of
> the first two elements, so that
> (istheMotherOf Mary Sam) appears as:
> {Mary istheMotherOf Sam}.
> When multiple arity relations are allowed, defined particle words
> associated with relations can also help, as in
> {NewJersey isBetween NewYork and Pennsylvania}.
> Wherever the usual KIF order makes linguistic sense, it can be retained,
> as in:
> (subtracting ?x from 15 gives 10).
>
> This should be easier to understand for those who speak an SVO language like
> English. Other languages can define their own order or delimiters. It
> would save time and make it easier to read discussions of complex axioms.
> Converting the braced format back to normal KIF can be done with a trivial
> utility. One doesn't actually have to use this notation, but knowing that
> the inversion of the first two elements creates the English-like SVO
> sentence will make the polarity clear, if the relations are named verbally.
>
> I can't quite understand the persistence of the use of simple nouns as
> relation names. It seems to be a holdover from a time when logic was done
> on very small sets of example relations.
>
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>
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> (04)
--
Paola Di Maio
School of IT
www.mfu.ac.th
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