[SCL] Suggestion for SCL extension module

[Murray Altheim]

John F. Sowa wrote:
> Murray,
> 
> OK.  I'll give you the executive summary.
> 
> MA> Could you distill that paper down to a paragraph summary?
> 
>>Actually, a short description of what that would mean
>>syntactically? It's a bit beyond my ability right now
>>to try to digest.
> 
> All the interesting ideas are in the semantics, which implies
> that modal operators, such as possibility, necessity, obligation, permission,
> etc., can be represented as shorthand
> notation for metalevel conditions.  Since we have intended to
> address metalevel issues at some time in 2004, it should be
> possible to support the features necessary to handle modal
> logics (and I believe nonmonotonic features, such as negation
> as failure) with little or no extra syntactic or semantic work.
> 
> Syntactically, there is very little impact on how one would
> represent the CL abstract syntax in XML.
> 
> In any case, this is not a critical issue that has to be
> resolved before December 12th.

Woof. It may not be a critical issue, but it certainly has me interested.
If you recall that my application is authoring, the list you provided:

 > that modal operators, such as possibility, necessity, obligation, permission,
 > etc., can be represented as shorthand

is a very interesting one. That it can be done low in the logic and
not high in the ontology is a great thing to hear. I look forward to
seeing that portion published, whenever it happens.

Thanks very much,

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

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