Hi John,
Those are interesting questions, so I will take a stab at answers that
don't fully satisfy me. Perhaps we can deepen this discussion a bit.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
John Bottoms wrote:
JB> There are a number of programmer's concepts
that have not
been explicitly touched upon. Here are my more recent
two.
How do we specify between something strong typing and
weak
typing in an ontology?
RC> Strong typing is a very valuable
construction tool in programming languages because it helps the programmer find
inconsistencies in his written expressions. I don't see the connection
between strong typing and ontologies. It's more a matter of how rigidly
and reliably a type can be wiggled by the programmer before the compiler
complains. I can use INTEGER for the number of wheels and not constrain
it, but that lets me work with vehicles that have 63 wheels, an unlikely
vehicle other than a train, or 0 wheels, like a bicycle in a repair shop.
So strong typing is useful if I use it to
discipline my program writing. But in an ontology, it’s FINDING out
what type an object has that's important - not specifying its type, IMHO.
And, there is the issue of counts in specifying the
number of
items in a set. SGML allows elements to be a)required,
b)zero
or more or c)one or more. Actually, I would like to go
beyond
that for clarity and have a count or be able to
constrain a
count to a range. (Is this the same question as the
first one?)
The base type of plurality should be subdivided
into different kinds of pluralities - sets, queues, tries ... having a COUNT
property built into the class plurality and inherited in one way or another by
each structure type.
For bicycle, I must have 2 wheels.
For vehicle, I might specify it as one or more, to
allow for
motorized unicycles.
For a bicycle, do I have to specify front_wheel and
rear_wheel
to assure that I get two wheels?
-John Bottoms
FirstStar
Concord,
MA
T: 978-505-9878