Off the top of my head, my
location seems like a quaternary relation (location Ali, x, ,y ,z) in 3D space.
Or by GPS, it'd be at least a ternary relation. Similarly, if i wanted a time
stamp associated within a relation (as opposed to a conjunction with
another relation), i'd want potentially higher arity relations.
[MW]
Unfortunately, I have spent a lot of time looking at how to model change, and
one of the key things that falls out is that things that look like n-ary
relations under a current state view need to become n binary relations under a
change over time view. This doesn’t mean that you don’t end up with
some n-ary relations, but far fewer than intuition would suggest. Also, teasing
relations apart (as Ian did with your example above) can help to produce a more
rigorous (and therefore more reusable) analysis.
Regards
Matthew
West
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