Re: Pizza Example

"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message news: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.

>

>


> Pizza  Mozzarella


>           Parmesan


>

Of course. This assumes that your main reason for storing the data is to display it again, in its original form, for humans. If that's all you're doing, then many different simple systems will suffice - a Word document, a spreadsheet, etc. But if you're trying to reason about the data, then you need to structure it in a way amenable to automated deduction. You are also perfectly free to keep a copy of the original, which would then be dependent upon the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key per normalization rules. Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 21:37:22 CEST