PH, JS, et al.: (01)
> Semantically, 'give' has three participants. One or two may be
> omitted in a grammatical English sentence if they are obvious
> from the context. But they exist, whether or not the speaker
> or listener knows who or what they are. (02)
To get back to a single relation that is stipulated rather than follow the
many (interesting) lexical/semantic paths surrounding donation, let's stick
with 'give' having all three parameters. (03)
Let me make what I think is the appropriate summary (yes many of the
following are arguable, and have already been argued, but there it is): (04)
Given the ternary relation "Gives(A, B, C)" (which happens to mean that A
gave B to C) we can easily encode it as three binary relations: assign a
unique x, then Gives1(x, A), Gives2(x, B), Gives3(x, C) is derivable from
the ternary relation and one can reverse the derivation. (05)
Converting everything to binary has its benefits: homogeneous
representation, most concepts are already binary (except maybe database
tables). (06)
However, despite its simplicity, this equivalence/derivation is not well
known, and even when known it is counterintuitive to use (as humans usually
write these things). (07)
Could the n-ary/binary debate be settled by allowing binary to be the
machine language and n-ary be the higher level human written language? (08)
--
Mitchell A. Harris
Research Faculty (Instructor in Computer Science)
Department of Radiology
Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School (09)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (010)
|