RE: SUO: What people mean
Dear Martin,
>
> Matthew, Pat, I strongly suggest the following view of
> (married Matthew
> Lydia):
>
> The word "married" can be used in NL to refer to two
> different, but closely
> related concepts. The first is the event of two people
> exchanging solemn
> vows in officially sanctioned circumstances. The second is
> the state that
> follows (I hope for many happy years) until some other event
> changes it. I
> suggest any real world state is in fact the result of an
> event, whether or
> not that event is explicitly known. On the other hand people
> often want to
> know about state and do not necessarily care about the event.
>
> I believe that IT and particularly data base people (and maybe even
> knowledge engineers and logicians) have come to think of
> representing state
> directly as the norm. In fact, if one follows a strategy of
> representing
> events directly and not state, it is normally easy to write
> logic rules to
> deduce state (where the reverse is in practice often difficult or
> impossible). Furthermore, if you look at time-honoured ways
> of keeping
> important records, they typically most closely represent an
> event. E.g.:
>
> a) Marriage certificate certifies the event of two people
> getting married
> and is no guarantee of the state.
> b) Birth certificate is similar
> c) Contract is the event of agreement
> d) Accounting transaction is an event
> e) Minutes of a meeting (e.g. x was elected/appointed to Y)
>
> I have been applying this idea successfully for years, but have only
> recently come to see it as a potentially universal strategy
> as a result of
> some of the recent SUO discussion.
>
MW: I agree this can be done, what's more I have done it. If you looked at
our original generic framework you would find pairs of associations, and teh
activities that caused and terminated the associations. The associations
were understood as derived (indeed caused by) the activities.
>
Regards
Matthew
============================================
Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management
Shell Services International
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929
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E-mail: Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com
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