RE: SUO: RE: A proposed SUO content outline
>I've snipped most of the following, and left only the snippet I want to
>comment on
>just now.
>
>It seems to me that it is fundamental that things don't have locations.
>They only
>have locations _relative_ to other things.
Why do you think so? This idea doesn't conform to normal geographical
intuition, it isn't supported by Newtonian physics and it isnt even
strictly true in General Relativity. I believe the only person who
seriously believed this was Ernst Mach.
> (This harks back to John
>Sowa's list
>of coordinate systems or coordinate free alternatives of a day or so back.)
>
>There is a function underlying _where_ that is a binary function, for
>example,
> separation(x,y).
>
>(Sorry, I can read some KIF but can't write it yet.).
>
>Then there would be functions from whatever is in the range of _separation_
> to the real numbers, so we would have, for example,
> miles(separation(me,home))= 15.
>
>It isn't too far from here to being able to define coordinate frames.
>I'll try
>to put some rigor behind this as an exercise for myself.
You might check out recent work by the Leeds group at
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/spacenet/publications.html#2000
especially
Bennett, B, Cohn, AG, Torrini, P and Hazarika, SM, A Foundation for
Region-Based Qualitative Geometry, Proceedings of 14th European
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2000), pp 204-208. Aug 20
- Aug 25, 2000, Berlin, Germany.
Pat Hayes
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