RE: multiple inheritance
Dear Dietrich,
Probably a case of coming from different directions. I am not familiar with
descriptive logic, so now that you mention it, I cannot be sure of what you
meant.
For me a primitive concept is one that cannot be derived from other
primitive concepts, being careful about circular derivations and such like.
This is not supposed to be a matter of choice. On the other hand, my best
guess at what you meant by primitive is that it is a concept for which a
definition, rather than a derivation, is given, whether or not it could be
derived from other concepts.
Do I understand you correctly?
Regards
Matthew
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Matthew West
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-----Original Message-----
From: Dietrich Fischer [mailto:fischer@darmstadt.gmd.de]
Sent: 19 June 2000 12:36
To: West, Matthew MR SSI-GPEA-UK; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: Re: multiple inheritance
Dear Matthew, you wrote
...Clearly "country" is not a primitive concept, ...
... probably there is no disagreement between us if you interpret
my words as put into parenthesis in my text
"a primitive (undefined or partially defined) concept" as a synonym in this
context.
In fact, I thought that I used the term "primitive" in the sense as
Description Logic (DL)
uses it, and do not think that they (DL fans) think (as well as I do not)
that "primitive concepts in DL sense" are not very complex and important
ones,
but concepts for which full definitions (in DL sense) are not or should
aimed at to be given.
When I had said:
If it makes sense to assert that an undefined concept D is a subconcept of A
and is also a subconcept of B...
I still wanted to find a more "clear" example (than "bunch of bricks") where
it makes sense...
and for this, I pointed back to the paper whose birth had created the
"multiple inheritance" avalanche. The issue of that paper still wants to be
discussed!?
Dietrich