[SCL] General sugar: an idea for discussion

[Robert E. Kent]

----- Original Message -----
From: "pat hayes" <phayes at ai.uwf.edu>
To: <scl at philebus.tamu.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 6:38 PM
Subject: [SCL] General sugar: an idea for discussion


> A presentation at the DAML PI meeting this week by Ben Grosf reported
> on the RuleML initiative. One of the topics he covered was the idea
> of expressing relations not by giving their arguments in an order (ie
> as an n-tuple) but instead by having named 'roles' for each argument,
> rendering the syntactic ordering irrelevant, and also by the way
> allowing partial information to be provided about an atom. Now, this
> is of course an old idea, but it seems to recur with remarkable
> regularity and be adopted again and again, so I wondered perhaps we
> should think about providing a syntax for this in SCL.
>
> I know, I know: we already do, in effect, because this amounts to the
> translation
>
> (R t1 ... tn) <=> (exists x  (R x) & (Role1 x t1) & (Role2 x t2) &
> .... (Rolen x tn) )

This old idea of thematic roles or case relations is important in the
formulation of an abstract first order language in the IFF where the logical
equivalence above takes the form of a categorical equivalence between the
IFF notion of a hypergraph (on the left) and the (somewhat new) IFF notion
of a spangraph (on the right).

Robert E. Kent
rekent at ontologos.org