Re: Pizza Example

From: Dawn M. Wolthuis <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:45:52 -0500
Message-ID: <c53vka$a7$1_at_news.netins.net>


"Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:oUcdc.52055$yG6.8836_at_newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
> "Jan Hidders" <jan.hidders_at_REMOVETHIS.pandora.be> wrote in message
> news:eR_cc.63743$eD5.4200565_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be...
> > Eric Kaun wrote:
> > > "Jan Hidders" <jan.hidders_at_REMOVETHIS.pandora.be> wrote in message
> > > news:YJZcc.63658$fD5.4201522_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be...
> > >
> > >>Eric Kaun wrote:
> > >>
> > >>>I'm certainly willing to entertain language notions - I just haven't
> > >
> > > heard
> > >
> > >>>anything concrete enough to serve as the basis for a data model.
Loose
> > >>>correspondence to English is, in my opinion, not a good metric.
> > >>
> > >>Did you ever look at the philosophy behind ORM (Object-Role
Modelling)?
> > >>Or the philosophy behind predicate logic, for that matter?
> > >
> > > No, can't say I have in any specific way. Pointers/links?
> >
> > For ORM see http://www.orm.net and as an introcution perhaps
> > http://www.orm.net/pdf/ORMwhitePaper.pdf
> >
> > For predicate logic you can always read Frege's Begriffsschrift. :-)
> > Sorry, only kidding. Can't think of a good reference right now.
> >
> > The point is that all these *are* in fact based upon a correspondance to
> > language. In some sense that was what the great discovery by Aristotle
> > was: the fact that you can sometimes reason on the basis of only the
> > *form* of statements. Hence Formal logic.
>
> Certainly - since computers can't understand meaning in the way that we
can
> (which we ourselves don't understand), it follows that form is about all
> there is, and thus the mechanizability of symbolic logic. I'm not
> downplaying the role of language, but languages that computers understand
> are far different than those we understand. So if we're going to use human
> language as a basis for computing, we have to specify which aspects of it,
> or subset of it, and furthermore impose rules that might not make much
> difference to our comprehension.

Obvously, the computer itself need not understand the language in order for us to understand language that is output from the computer. So, if we don't split up English sentences (for example) unnecessarily when we feed them to the computer as "data," then we can retrieve them in a form closer to the original.

So, if "the Pizza has Mozzarella and Parmesan cheese" is stored as:

Pizza Mozzarella

          Parmesan

in a single, uh, record, then if the ordering is unwittingly useful, we didn't harm that ordering.

--dawn Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 18:45:52 CEST

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