SUO: RE: Meaning-preserving translations
Thank you, John. I had read your KR book earlier and made a note to myself
about this section. In discussing meaning-preserving mappings in this way a
framework and vocabulary is established which should be useful in discussing
SUO tasks; here we approach the thick of the thicket, as Jon Awbrey might
say.
For myself, I would like to know what refinements/additions you may have
made to these definitions, and what exploration you or others have made of
the general circumstances in which they may obtain or not. One area of my
interest lies with your informal notion of languages (formal or natural)
being (comparatively) "expressive". Another concerns the extension of these
notions to the case of contexts (sets of sentences, possibly infinite);
another, where and how the computability strictures are applied; yet
another, in what cases MPTs are 'faithful' under language expansions and
reducts.
Jay
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2000 7:40 PM
To: jawbrey@oakland.edu; jhalcomb@teknowledge.com;
standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: Meaning-preserving translations
Jon and Jay,
I extracted some material from Ch. 5 of my KR book and put it
in a web page:
http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/ontology/meaning.htm
This contains the definition of _meaning-preserving translation_,
which I mentioned in a previous note. It also has some examples
to illustrate several different MPT functions.
Note that the word "meaning" is not a technical term in this
discussion. It is only a character string that forms part of
the name of that type of translation function. A less misleading,
but perhaps less memorable name would be the character string "MPT".
MPT functions of this kind would be useful for translating SUO-KIF
to and from other notations, such as SUO Controlled English,
conceptual graphs, etc.
John Sowa