SUO: RE: CG: Re: Ontology
John, following the links in the document below, I got to
http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/ace.htm and at the bottom of
that, I came to a "controlled languages home page" link at:
http://salto.let.uu.nl/www/Controlled-languages/
but that link doesn't seem to work. Is there another
link you can furnish? It sounds like a useful organization.
Thanks,
Rich
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Jean-Luc,
>
> There was no "ontology war". Jay was merely repeating
> the same old BS he was taught in school, and I was
> pointing out that the people who know better know better.
>
> In any case, I have been busy working on writing the
> specifications for CLCE (Common Logic Controlled English).
> See the abstract below and the pointer to the (still
> unfinished) report.
>
> Re "What is mathematics": That's a fairly decent
> summary of math. Nothing controversial.
>
> John
> ________________________________________________________
>
> Source: http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/clce.htm
>
>
> Common Logic Controlled English
> Incomplete Draft, 31 January 2004
>
> John F. Sowa
>
> Abstract: Common Logic Controlled English (CLCE) is a formal
> language
> with an English-like syntax. Anyone who can read ordinary English can
> read sentences in CLCE with little or no training. Writing CLCE,
> however, requires practice in learning to stay within its
> syntactic and
> semantic limitations. Formally, CLCE supports full first-order logic
> with equality supplemented with an ontology for sets, sequences, and
> integers. The fundamental semantic limitation of CLCE is that the
> meaning of every CLCE sentence is defined by its translation to FOL;
> none of the flexibility of ordinary English and none of its
> metaphorical
> or metonymic extensions are supported. The primary syntactic
> restrictions are the use of present tense verbs and singular nouns,
> variables instead of pronouns, parentheses to delimit lists, single
> quotes to delimit names that contain nonalphabetic
> characters, and only
> a small subset of the many syntactic options permitted in English.
> Despite these limitations, CLCE can express the kind of
> English used in
> software specifications, textbooks of mathematics, and the
> definitions
> and axioms of formal ontology.
> 1 Overview
>
> The design goal for Common Logic Controlled English (CLCE) is
> to stay as
> close as possible to precise, well-written English while supporting
> automated translation to first-order logic (FOL). The syntax
> of CLCE is
> similar to the kind of English used in software documentation and
> textbooks of mathematics. Anyone who can read English can read CLCE
> without special training. The hardest part of learning to
> write CLCE is
> staying within the semantic restrictions of FOL. Those
> restrictions are
> familiar to anyone who has used languages for database query,
> software
> design, or formal specification, such as SQL, UML, Express,
> and Z. Since
> those languages can be automatically translated to and from FOL, they
> can also be translated to and from CLCE. Therefore, CLCE can
> be used as
> a readable documentation language that can be compiled to an
> implementation language. In that regard, CLCE is similar to other
> controlled languages such as Attempto Controlled English
> (Fuchs et al.
> 1998), which is compiled to Prolog.
>
> Since CLCE has the full expressive power of first-order logic, it is
> possible to translate any FOL statement in predicate
> calculus, CGIF, or
> many other notations into CLCE. The translation from FOL to
> CLCE can be
> automated, but with certain qualifications:
>
> 1. If the FOL statement had originally been generated from CLCE,
> then the declarations of names and other words used to
> translate CLCE to
> FOL could also be used to translate the FOL back to CLCE.
>
> 2. If the FOL statement had not be derived from CLCE, the
> translation into CLCE could only be done if the mappings of
> the symbols
> used in FOL to the words used in CLCE were specified by the
> same kind of
> information given in CLCE declarations.
>
> 3. Since both CLCE and FOL provide many alternative ways
> of stating
> the same proposition, the reverse translation might not be
> identical to
> the original CLCE statement, but it should be logically equivalent.
>
> 4. Conceptual graphs (CGs) have been designed to support a direct
> translation to and from natural languages. Therefore, the reverse
> translation from CGs to CLCE tends to be closer to the original CLCE
> form than the translations from other versions of FOL.
>
> 5. As examples of reverse translations, consider the
> following three
> CLCE sentences, which are logically equivalent:
>
> Every prime number less than 3 is even.
>
> For every number x, if x is prime,
> and x is less than 3, then x is even.
>
> For every x, if x is a number, x is prime,
> and x is less than 3, then x is even.
>
> If the first sentence were translated to CGs, the reverse
> translation would produce the original. The second sentence
> would result
> from translating the first to typed predicate calculus and
> back to CLCE.
> The third sentence would result from translating to untyped predicate
> calculus and back to CLCE.
>
> 6. The proof that the reverse translation is equivalent to the
> original can always be done efficiently. In fact, the number of
> interchanges and substitutions required for the proof is linearly
> proportional to the length of the statement.
>
> The ability to do translations in both directions enables CLCE to be
> used as a documentation language that is always synchronized with the
> implementation: any changes to either the documentation or the
> implementation can always be translated to the other. Errors
> and typos
> that may be hard to detect in unfamiliar notations are often
> easier to
> see in CLCE, and they can be found even by people who have
> never studied
> CLCE.
>
> ==============================================================
> ==========
> To post a message, send mail to cg@cs.uah.edu.
> To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@cs.uah.edu with the command
> 'unsubscribe cg' in the message body.
> See http://www.virtual-earth.de/CG/cg-list/ for the mailing
> list archive
> See http://www.cs.uah.edu/~delugach/CG for the Conceptual
> Graph Home Page
> For help or administrative assistance, mail to owner-cg@cs.uah.edu
> ll
>