Re: Joint Committee telecon tomorrow 4 November

From: pat hayes (phayes@ihmc.us)
Date: 11/04/03

  • Next message: Sandro Hawke: "Re: technical detail feedback on OWL Rules: truth value for empty consequent"
    Suggestion, following Ben's reporting of Tim's observation. The ideas 
    that (1) an empty consequent is 'false' and (2) that a consequent is 
    a conjunction, are in opposition. The former arises historically from 
    thinking of a rule as an implication or a sequent, where a compound 
    consequent would be considered a disjunction.  I think this is a 
    fundamental snag in the current proposal ( sorry I didnt notice it 
    before) and suggest that we change the basic rule syntax slightly so 
    that consequents are atomic, not conjunctive, but then allow the 
    present case as a Lloyd-Topor style syntactic sugar for a conjunction 
    of rules. This changes the presentation slightly but makes it natural 
    for an empty consequent to be considered a missing atom - false - 
    rather than an empty conjunction - true. It also simplifies the 
    semantics, and makes the Lloyd-Topor mapping work properly in all 
    cases.
    
    Pat
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