Re: SUO: Universal Time, other universals, and cultural contextof SUO.

["John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>]

In my previous note, I misspelled Iris T's last name.  Following is
the web site with an abstract of the dissertation by Iris T. Tommelein,
who is now a professor at Berkeley:

   http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~tommelein/89-Tommelein-PhD.html

The title is

   SightPlan: An Expert System that Models and Augments Human
   Decision Making for Designing Construction Site Layouts.

Following is the original note (with corrected spelling).
______________________________________________________________________

Pat,

I just remembered another important example of the relevance
of natural language semantics to knowledge representation.

> But if it really is a semantics of English, I doubt if it will be
> of great KR interest: there are so many things in the world that
> English has no semantics for.

In 1987, I was spending several months at the IBM Palo Alto
Scientific Center, and Gio Wiederhold suggested that I teach
a course at Stanford, which has a slot for visiting professors
from industry.  The course I taught was entitied "Conceptual
Structures", and of course it used my CS book as the text.
But I did cover many related topics, including the relationships
between NL semantics and KR.

One of the students in the class, Iris Tommelein, was working on
her PhD in Civil Engineering, using KR techniques for representing
spatial relationships in various kinds of structures.  She asked
me for references on various kinds of spatial relations that might
be suitable for representing her problems.

I suggested that she look at some of the papers by the linguist
Len Talmy, who had done a lot of work in collecting and analyzing
spatial relations as represented in many different languages.
Iris T. found that Talmy's primitives, which were common across
many languages, were very useful as a basic set for kn. rep. of
spatial relationships, and she used them as a basis for her
dissertation.

A few years later, I happened to run into a professor from the
Stanford civil engineering dept., who said that they done a lot
more work extending and developing that original set of relations
that Iris T. had started with.

John Sowa