Re: SUO: On the supreme supertype -- RE: RE: RE: RE: On the relevance of EXPRESS, EPISTLE, etc. to SUO
meersman@vub.ac.be (Robert Meersman):
>### For ORM/NIAM (remember, LOTs and NOLOTs a while back?) we coined
>the term "pater familias", often abbreviated to "PAF" for that
>little extra distance to spurious interpretation --some people think
>in Latin it seems--, for the Object/Thing/Entity/
>Referent/Supreme_supertype/Whatever... It is of course the same as
>what e.g. John Sowa denotes with a "T"-like symbol in his book, but
>PAF is less ascii-challenged. As a matter of fact, a simple "T"
>would *also* do fine as long as nobody thinks it stands for universal
>truth or so :-)
I think that the usual reason for using T is that is stands simply
for "Top", ie the label given to the top of the classification
lattice. This is about as neutral a term as one could wish for.
I have to say that if this group feels that deciding on a name for
the top node is a topic worth wasting more than about a millisecond
on, then there is little hope for the future.
Pat Hayes
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