Sorry, should have finished what I was saying.
From: Matthew West [mailto:dr.matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 12 December 2014 23:24
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: RE: [ontolog-forum] Need advice
Dear Duane,
I would expect “John is the father of Chris” and “Chris is the son of John” to be described as inverses of each other. In entity-relationship land these would simply be descriptions of the same relationship in different directions.
When I have come across isomorphic relationships I am used to that being when you can always map back to the same place. A practical example would be that the Celsius scale is an isomorphic mapping between numbers and temperatures, i.e. the same number can always be mapped to the same degree of hotness.
[MW>] The father son relationship is not isomorphic because each father does not always and only have one son.
I hope that helps.
Regards
Matthew West
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk
+44 750 338 5279
What would be a suitable term to call a binary relationship that is co-dependent yet not symmetrical to another relationship between the same entity in a binary relationship?
If "John is a father of Chris”, how can we describe that relationship in terms of comparing it to “Chris is a son of John”? Would “isomorphic” be the best term to use? “Inverse”? Assume that the relationship is traversable from either side.
The context of this is in a graph database discussion group. Graph Databases have nodes and relationships. Either can have properties. Unlike RDBMS systems, graph databases have relationships between instances of nodes, not a foreign key relationship with an entire table.
The binary relationship is not symmetric since true symmetry would require that the statements “..is a father of…” and “…is a son of…” be equally true for A-B as they are for B-A.
Sorry for this simple request. I am just trying to find the best description for this.
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