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Re: [ontolog-forum] CL and Mutual Interpretability

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: "Discussion of ISO Common Logic Standard (ISO/IEC 24707)" <cl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 12:23:14 -0500
Message-id: <4D3F0702.3080501@xxxxxxxxxxx>
On 1/25/2011 3:49 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
> But for Common logic, things are not so simple.
> CL allows multiple dialects, each with a different syntax.
> Simply copying a text in one dialect into a text written
> in a different dialect could produce a chimera which was not
> in either dialect, and would not be legal CL. So there has
> to be a condition which makes the importing operation make
> sense.    (01)

I agree that requirement adds further considerations that must
be added to the definition of "imports" in Section 6.3.    (02)

Since the goal of Common Logic (including its name) is
to provide a single, unified semantics for an open-ended
number of dialects, we should clarify the standard to
make the translations between dialects explicit.    (03)

Suggestion:    (04)

  1. Adopt a single canonical form, in terms of which the semantics
     of any and every dialect is defined by its translation to the
     canonical form.  (This is basically the suggestion you made
     in an earlier note.)    (05)

  2. Each dialect must specify a mapping from its own syntax to
     the syntax of either the canonical form or some other dialect
     that already has a mapping to the canonical form.    (06)

Comment:  In the current version of ISO 24707, that canonical
form can be considered the "core" subset of CLIF.  In both
Annex A for CLIF and Annex B for CGIF, we defined the full
language by a translation to a simpler "core".  That core
(or something similar) can be taken as the canonical form.    (07)

  3. Additional mappings could be defined for translations from
     the core to other dialects.  Such mappings could be complete
     (if the target dialect is sufficiently expressive) or partial
     (if the target is less expressive than the core).    (08)

  4. Given such mappings, the import operation can be defined
     in terms of copy, merge, and map.  The result of any import
     must be a text written in a single dialect whose semantics
     is determined by its mapping to the canonical form.    (09)

This issue should be added to the agenda for the next revision
of the CL standard.    (010)

John    (011)

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