[Person-ontology] D7 - Which languages are better than OWL?

[Gian Piero Zarri]

    Dear Philippe,

    Apparently, you have some problems in catching my central point, 
which is very simple. Independently then from any representational 
trick, from RDF to FCG or other, this point is that, in an n-ary 
situation like that represented by the event "Mary has given a book to 
Bill", you are surely entitled to decompose this situation in a series 
of binary relationships, saying, e.g., that Mary is the subject of an 
action of giving but, in order to "understand" really this elementary 
event, you must necessarily merge again the single binary relationships 
in a global unit, (an n-ary one), and to work on this in a global way. 
If you deal with the elementary binary relationships separately (this is 
what the W3C languages allow at the moment), it is difficult you will 
ever be able to move beyond the inferences of the "uncle" type the 
SWRL's supporters are fond of.

    In NKRL, an event like the above is represented as an instance of a 
general, n-ary "template" of the type 
"Move:TransferMaterialThingToSomeone", which is a specialization of a  
"Move:TransferToSomeone" template. In the two templates (and in their 
instances) the semantic predicate is (conventionally) MOVE, and the 
slots SUBJ, OBJ and BENEFICIARY are necessarily filled; the other 
(MODAL, CONTEXT etc.) can be filled or not depending from the original 
formulation of the event. In the concrete instances, the temporal 
information must obviously be added. All the inferences are then 
executed starting from this unitary, n-ary block. Note, moreover, that I 
have voluntarily chosen a particularly simple example, avoiding, e.g., 
to speak of "connectivity phenomena" in the style of "Mary has given a 
book to Bill BECAUSE it was Bill's birthday".
   
    There are some other strange statements in your mail, like "... the 
primitive notion here is the concept type Gift, not the relation types 
gift etc." (???) but, as you suggest, I will reply, in case, separately 
(but only when my book will be finished).

    Regards,

    GPZ




mail at PHILIPPEMARTIN.COM wrote:

>Dear Gian,
>
>  
>
>>"a representation using an n-ary relation can always be converted
>> to a representation using a binary relation, without loss of
>> semantics" ... "without loss of semantics" is false.
>>    
>>
>
>I was waiting/hoping for that feedback.
>Unfortunately, I am missing the (fine) point(s) in both your
>email and the article you cited:
>1) Where is the loss of semantics when you translate
>     (giftOfSomethingBySomeoneToSomeoneSometime 
>            book328    Mary128  Bill948 '12/9/2007')
>   into (I use the FCG notation here)
>         [a Gift, object: book328, agent: Mary128,
>                  recipient: Bill948, date:12/9/2007]
>   or to [ [a Gift, object: book328, agent: Mary128,
>                    recipient: Bill948], date:  12/9/2007]
>   I only see an increase of precision/semantic because
>   the roles have been explicited. As you acknowledge in
>   our article this decomposition avoids the combinatorial
>   explosion of relation types such as 
>   giftOfSomethingBySomeoneToSomeoneSometime, which
>   furthermore cannot be ordered into a specialization 
>   hierarchy (thus making knowledge re-use and comparison
>   difficult). I'd add the fact that you can quantify the
>   concept type 'Gift' (e.g., "2 Gift"or "any Gift") but not
>   the previous relation type. Hence, I think the primitive
>   notion here is the concept type Gift here, not the relation
>   types gift or giftOfSomethingBySomeoneToSomeoneSometime.
>2) At the end of page 3 of your article, you hint at the
>   n-ary nature of the anonymously referred situation instance
>   (in my above example, the particular gift , say,
>    gift739ofSomeBookFromMary128ToBill948AtDate12/9/2007).
>   I personally see this instance as an instance of the 
>   concept type Gift, not as an instance of an n-ary relationship
>   but, in any case, what are the consequences (where is the
>   loss of semantics)?
>3) what are these inferences that must "NECESSARILY" be made in NKRL
>   even though NKRL can be fully translated from and to RDF?
>   (I actually only saw binary relations in the NKRL examples
>   of your article but I admit I have not yet read Section 3
>   in detail). Please use an example, preferably using KIF or FCG.
>  
>Given we are here departing a bit from the core goal of D7, it might
>be better to answer to me directly and I'll then post a summary of 
>the underlying ideas in my structured format (when I understand 
>these ideas enough to give a good summary). I let you be judge.
>
>Philippe
>
>  
>

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