From: Jim Hendler ([email protected])
Date: 02/05/01
>s)
>
>The operational difference appear, to me, to be two-fold:
>
>1/ Combination classes cannot be formed in Ian's and my approach. That is,
> you can't create the class of ``integers greater than 15 or people with
> two brothers who are doctors''.
>
>2/ The only concrete classes that can be formed are those that are part of
> the concrete type system (in this case XML Schema datatypes). That is,
> you can't create the class of integers who used to be the number of
> employees of AT&T at the beginning of every month in the last year.
>
>My view (and I think that Ian and Deb would agree) is that these classes
>are not very useful, or at least that they can be avoided. In particular,
>the second class would much better be modelled as a sequence of integers,
>not as a class of integers. Even if you really want an unordered
>collection, an existential set (i.e., not an intensional class) appears to
>be a suitable choice.
>
OK, I'm beginning to get it -- but here's the issue, in my paper
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/AgentWeb.html I describe the sort of
application I want to do with the ontology language. A key point is
my being able to check whether inputs are legal within some defined
range. For example, I have a service with two parts. First, it
check to make sure that you enter a legal date in February of 2001
(i.e. an integer between 1 and 28). Then it checks to see if you
enter a legal Credit card number (for now let's ignore format and say
an integer between 0 and 999999999999999).
I realize I don't have to define a type to do this, but being a dumb
C programmer it seems to me that that would be a good way to do it.
Can you guys tell me how to do it correctly both in Peter/Ian and
Dan's approaches?
(basically, I'm probing for a realistic use case to get this right -
obviously a number from 1-28 can be easily handled as a sequence, but
I worry about having to enumerate numbers in the trillions)
thanks
JH
Prof. James Hendler [email protected]
Computer Science Dept 703-696-2238 (phone)
Univ of Maryland 703-696-2201 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20853 http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
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