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Re: SUO: RE: Criteria that an ontology must satisfy




Robert-

Thanks for your message.

>Bottom line: in IFF I do not need a sorted extension of KIF for this kind of
>type restriction.

I tend to agree.

Let me give you a quick heads-up on where my own thinking is on 
'sorts'. I had been developing quite an elaborate proposal for the 
sorted extension to new KIF, when Chris recently sent me a draft of a 
proposal for a 'structural ontology' which is all about classes and 
class heirarchies, but expressed in unsorted KIF. What we now both 
see is that we had been developing the same idea in different 
vocabularies, and that there are three issues best kept distinct:

(1) the description of a suitably elaborate class heirarchy

(2) relating that heirarchy to the notion of predicate-application in 
the language itself

(3) marking the syntax of the langauge so that class-membership 
inferences can be efficiently checked by a parser without invoking 
general inference mechanisms.

Both (1) and (2) can be done in an unsorted language; making it 
'sorted' amounts to (3); but it is the same heirarchy.

We are trying to get this written up in a coherent form soon.

Pat Hayes

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