Pat, (01)
The position I most strongly advocate is not a specific ontology,
but a framework of conventions for organizing a multiplicity
of special cases (not necessarily consistent with one another),
making the implicit relationships explicit, and providing tools
and guidelines for mixing and matching. The lattice of theories
is an example. Robert Kent's IFF is a much more ambitious example. (02)
I would recommend a fairly simple framework for starters, since
there's a danger of freezing half-baked ideas before they're fully
baked. (RDF, for example, was hardly out of the oven before
Tim Bray tried, unsuccessfully, to pull it back in.) (03)
> Do you have any granularity axioms? That is one of the hardest
> ontological problems, in my experience. (04)
There are so many hard problems, it's hard to say which are harder.
But the idea of taking the least significant digit as the criterion
for implicit granularity is fairly common for experimental data
(unless some explicit margin of error is stated). (05)
Re PTim: I realize that calling an interval a point is problematical.
But in anything that has to do with the physical world, there is no
way to specify a true point. Perhaps a better term would be "grain
in time", abbreviated "Grit". (06)
John (07)
PS re HTML email formats: Your note of 11:18 was in a readable font
for Thunderbird, but your note of 11:37 appeared in a tiny, tiny font.
I had to increase the font size by two steps to make it the same as
the previous note. But then the fonts for all other notes were too
big, and I had to decrease the default by two steps. (08)
At least each of your notes was entirely in one font size. I've
received some email in which each paragraph was in a progressively
smaller font. That's why I hate HTML email. (09)
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