Re: A Normalization Question

> As a consequence we need a means of
> disambiguating semantically different things that coincidentally
> happen to have the same name in English, such as the name "Brown"
> and the colour "Brown". Two ways of doing this are (1) context: we
> know from the type of a given argument position of a given
> relation whether "Brown" must denote a name or a colour or a
> particular spelling and (2) by simply giving them different
> symbolic names that just happen to elsewhere be realated to the
> same spelling.

Via XDb2's GUI, user indicates string 'brown' by selecting node thing/string/brown. User indicates color by selecting node thing/color/brown (which references string 'brown'). User indicates person by selecting node thing/person/brown (which references string 'brown').

Via XDb2's Natural Language interface (under dev), it would be "(string)'brown' or 'brown'", "(color)brown" and "(person)brown".

www.xdb2.com/Example/ThingsNamedBrown.asp represents a person named brown who lives on brown street, drives a brown car, has brown hair, wears a brown suit, and has one brown and one blue eye. Even though there are many things named by string 'brown', there is only one string 'brown' (ID 2091) in the entire db. Received on Fri Jul 23 2004 - 22:13:21 CEST