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Robert E. Kent wrote:
<snip>
> In summary, in Information Flow an instance is not thought of as an
> individual, but as an element in one pole of a polarity.
>
> Robert E. Kent
> rekent@ontologos.org
</snip>
In Open Knowledge Base Connectivity, at
http://www.ai.sri.com/~okbc/spec/okbc2/okbc2.html
An Entity (i.e., an instance of the :THING class) can be either
a Class or an Individual, but these two are mutually exclusive.
So an instance of a class is necessarily an Entity, and may or
may not be an Individual. If not an Individual, it must be a
class.
So the method of identification for Individuals is different
from Entities. It seems to me that identification ought to be
designed specifically for Entities, since literally everything is
descended from an Entity. So a pair of shoes is one Entity,
and the left shoe and the right shoe of the same pair are
also Entities. If I know that something is an Entity, but know
nothing else about it, I can efficiently represent it relationally
as I discover more and more information about the Entity. I can
immediately assign it a unique ID for keying relations, although
I may create other Entities that are semantically related to the
Entity, themselves also Entities.
The point is that the identification process would seem to have
advantages in being Entity based rather than Individual based.
Any comments on the subject of identification are very welcome.
Rich