On Sat, April 28, 2012 21:17, William Frank wrote: (01)
> This is for sure. It is certainly not OWL's fault that its practitioners
> seem to also to believe, as the father's of UML seem to have, that human
> creations, like cars and wine and securities, based on people
> *imagining *combinations of features, and so putting new tires
> on their car, or adding loan features
> to a checking account, can be described with the same kinds of taxonomies,
> based on biological inheritance, as plants and animals. (02)
Agreed. Simplification to tree structures of hierarchical inheritance
is oversimplification that does not map well to the "real world". (03)
> Just to continue the rant on a different subject, I add that UML wants to
> suggest that when people say that red is a color, they are ***speaking a
> different language** (a metalanguage, no less!) than when the say the
> balloon is red, and that UML tries to even have different languages, and
> even different WORDS, for talking about balloons (or signals), (which are
> "objects)", and being a balloon (or a message) (which are "classes"!) (04)
This is another problem with many people who over"simplify". There is
strong objection to metaclasses in some areas -- based on the belief that
the use of metaclasses will add too much to computational complexity. (05)
If relations (or attributes) are defined with arguments constrained to
instances of specified classes and classes can not themselves be
instances of (meta)classes, then relations may not be asserted
between classes. In order to make assertions about such classes,
those with this philosophy have to go through hoops -- all in the interest
of "simplicity". 8)# (06)
-- doug f (07)
> ...
>
> --
> William Frank
>
> 413/376-8167
>
>
> This email is confidential and proprietary, intended for its addressees
> only.
> It may not be distributed to non-addressees, nor its contents divulged,
> without the permission of the sender. (08)
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