[topicmapmail] adding negation to a scope

[Murray Altheim]

Asle Pedersen wrote:
> 
> In order to state that a Topic is valid within the constraints of everything
> except a given scope, is there any preferred method of adding negation to a
> scope? In other terms this would mean creating a scope using the exception
> rather than the rule. e.g. St.Petersburg did_not_ have that name in the
> period 1914-1991. Is there perhaps a naming convention for scopes of this
> type or any other Topic attributes that could be used in order to tell an
> application that the scope should be interpreted with negation.

There are currently (to my knowledge) no publicly published topics for
propositional calculus or predicate logic, except as part of the Cyc 
ontology work I've done, but unfortunately I'm just in the process of
switching service providers and domains, so they're unavailable. I'll
be republishing the entire set under a new domain soon, but these of
course are specific to the Cyc ontology. 

As a more generic (and much smaller) set, I've written up a topic map 
for both basic propositional calculus and predicate logic and will be 
publishing that later this year, as I need this for my own work. It will 
include negation, conjunction, disjunction, etc. 

The OASIS Published Subjects TC is currently at work on best practices 
for such publications, ie., how such a topic map should appear
semantically and syntactically. 

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim, Staff Engineer          <mailto:murray.altheim&#64;sun.com>
Java and XML Software
Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025

       Ernst Martin comments in 1949, "A certain degree of noise in 
       writing is required for confidence. Without such noise, the 
       writer would not know whether the type was actually printing 
       or not, so he would lose control."