[topicmapmail] basics II - Inheritance in Topic Maps

[Murray Altheim]

Robert Barta wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 02:09:44PM +0100, Murray Altheim wrote:
> 
>>.......................................... I've been recently reading
>>a little of Robert Brandom ("Articulating Reasons"), and I agree with
>>his basic pragmatic premise that it is language that defines thinking,
>>not the other way around.............................................
> 
> This premise is - if remember correctly - supported by the 'evolutionary
> cognition theory' (Evolutionaere Erkenntnistheorie). According to them
> we are thinking patterns into this world and test them for appropriateness.

I don't pretend to any expertise on Brandom, but that seems correct to
my understanding.

>>..... By this reasoning, there may be as many ontological expressions
>>as there are people; by definition this would seem to be the case.
> 
> And one of the tests is whether communication is still possible.
 >
> But communication is often NOT necessary, or only in a very limited
> community: Not many people will understand the abstractions involved
> in proving 'Fermat's last theorem'.

Yes, communication is never "global", only contextual, between the
a specific "source" and "target". I sometimes think only a few people
understand me -- this is perhaps not an unusual feeling for some people...

>>.............................I'll have to look again at AsTMa!  I'm
>>particularly interested in expressing my ontologies in XTM syntax,
>>which (to my way of thinking) would mean that the "ontology toolkit"
>>would be delivered as a collection of PSI sets/modules and a tutorial
>>on how to use them in constructing ontologies.
> 
> Of course any AsTMa! expression (a statement) can be serialized in
> 
>   (a) XML syntax (for the "<> lovers"), or
>   (b) in XTM
> 
> It is simply a matter of practicality whether I write 4 lines or 40.
> A simple statement like "all lawyers are trustworthy" in AsTMa!
> 
>    forall [ $a (lawyer) ]
>      => exists [ $a (trustworthy-person) ]
> 
> would be translated into adhoc XTMish:
> 
> <topicMap ...
> 
> <topic id="x12345">
[...]
> </topicMap>
> 
> Such monster code would be only popular among Java and Forth
> programmers ;-} [ Har har, evil laughter fading ... ]

yeah, yeah. But sometimes that XTM/XML is pretty necessary. And it's
validatable using common tools. (not that I have no sense of humour)

> It is similar but not so bad for pure XML as I can hide the semantics
> in the tags.

Now it's time for my evil laughter...

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

   "We can now hypothesise with some confidence that those apparently
    happy, calm Buddhist souls one regularly comes across in places
    such as Dharamsala, India, really are happy," said Professor Owen
    Flanagan, of Duke University in North Carolina. -- BBC News
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3047291.stm