SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema -- Matthew West
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LIS. Discussion Note 21
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Pierre,
We are presently engaged in a discussion period on Matthew's motion,
and I have been doing what I would ordinarily do in a first pass
formalization attempt, carefully reading the material presented
and trying to figure out which parts of it are easy marks for
rendering at the simplest levels of logic and set theory.
I started at the top:
| thing
|
| A <thing> is anything that is or may be thought about or perceived,
| including material and non-material objects, ideas, and actions.
Is this meant to be a formal definition or a helpful hint?
That is the reflexive (knee-jerk) sort of question that I
would methodically ask of each clause that comes along in
such a document. I think Matthew said it was "normative",
so I took it as being something to examine very carefully.
At any rate, the statement makes a reference to actions,
ideas, perceptions, and thoughts. A mention of thought,
for our purposes, is an implied reference to signs, etc.
That is how the issue of signs arose in this discussion,
period.
I continued:
| Every <thing> is either
| a <possible_individual>,
| or an <abstract_object>.
|
| NOTE 1. Every <thing> is identifiable within a system.
| System identifiers created by other systems and received
| as part of a data exchange may be stored for future reference
| as an identification, referring to the originating organisation
| or system.
|
| NOTE 2. Every example provided for other entity data types
| declared in this schema is also an example of <thing>.
NOTE 1 mentions identifiers. Matthew informed me that
NOTES and EXAMPLES are "informative", or informational
in some weaker sense than normative definitions, if I
got the nuance of all that yet, but it still seems to
me that the requirement of system identifiers amounts
to a non-trivial constraint on what can be dealt with
by the prospective formal system, and, moreover, that
this NOTE is closely bound up with the invocation of
perceptions (data) and thoughts (words) at the top.
That is how these concepts are pertinent to the present discussion.
Jon Awbrey
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