Re: Nearest Common Ancestor Report (XDb1's $1000 Challenge)

> My guess is that XDb1 would accept the following without complaining:
> person isa thing.
> john isa person.
> mary isa person.
> neo isa john.
>
> XDb1 will probably gladly store it - but what does it mean?

At the db level, it would mean exactly the same as:  t1 isa t.

 t2 isa t1.
 t3 isa t1.
 t4 isa t2.

At the db level, it doesn't care what the app is trying to encode. It is upto the app to ensure the data has relavence to something. It could mean the following:

 vehicle isa thing.
 car isa vehicle.
 bus isa vehicle.
 corvette isa car.

If Neo is a cloned from John, then even your example above could have meaning. Received on Tue May 18 2004 - 22:18:40 CEST