Re: Storing data and code in a Db with LISP-like interface

From: mAsterdam <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org>
Date: Tue, 02 May 2006 23:04:38 +0200
Message-ID: <4457c93d$0$31655$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>

Neo wrote:
> ... I assert that dbd's methodology is
> the most general/systematic/flexible. I do not assert it is the
> fastest, smallest, most user friendly, least resource hungry, most
> popular, etc.

I have no desire to disprove your assertion that "dbd's methodology is the most general/systematic/flexible." - I don't even understand it.

I do appreciate that you are going your own stubborn way to create a system that has the qualities you want it to have. You have been accused of re-inventing just about everybodies favourite toy/tool. To me that means you must be doing /something/ right.

Some of those qualities - as I understood them - reminded me of prolog. You downloaded it, and played with it. I hope you get some
refinement of/reflection on your ideas from that.

OTOH I would also appreciate it if you would stop making false assertions as to what other systems can't do.

Nick Malik wrote:

>>If you expect intelligent people to hold a discourse with you, 
>>you have to treat us with enough respect to back away from rampant
>>superiority to think about the question.

>
> Sorry, but I took mAsterdam question to mean: what is the significance
> of representing things, which in this case was the relator/verb (which
> I was calling relationship) as shown in the "john like mary" example.

You might read it as just: Please be specific when stating what you want to know. See below

>>You have assumed that it is valid to create a relationship between
>>two things and to want to know what that relationship is.
>>I have SHOWN you how Prolog would do this, 
>>by identifying the relationship as one of the items in the tuple.

>
> Sorry, I meant the thing being represented in the function's name.
> Please show how that data is represented as
> systematically/flexibly/generically as in dbd.

You had demos of dbd's previous incarnation at a site, but it seems down.

>>Prolog and Lisp are knowledge representation systems.
>>Relational databases are primarily data representation systems,
>>but if you look at the schema, you can quite frequently ascertain
>>the business rules that existed at the time of design. 
>>Perhaps this is a bad place to code business rules.
>>Perhaps not.  I think that there are arguments both ways.
>>Regardless, knowledge is represented both in the form of facts and
>>in the form, in the case of Lisp and Prolog, in deductions.

>
>
> I have no opinion on the above, but I still assert that dbd provides
> the most general/systematic/flexible way to represent things. For
> instance, dbd does not represent the data in Prolog's function any
> differently than other data. For instance, dbd does not represent the
> name of an atom any differently than other data. And I have and can
> show again examples to demonstrate these points.
>
>

>>Therefore it is absolutely incumbent upon you to explain 
>>why you would want to choose a knowledge representation 
>>that does not collect a bit of information and then assert
>>that the mining of that information is so fundamental to 
>>the requirements as to be beneath you to explain it.

>
> Excuse me? Both the dbd and Prolog examples represented approximately
> same things.
>
> In dbd: (create john like mary)
> In Prolog: like(john, mary)
>
> I then showed how to get like (relator/verb) when provided john and
> mary with the following query: (select john * mary). Please show how to
> do it as systematically in Prolog.

You have created vocabulary of your own - it isn't allways easy to see what needs some translation. I can't read your mind and I did not read all your previous posts. It helps if you are specific about the information needs.

I took some of your statements rather literal to bitplumb the following:

-----------neorel.pro

thing(john).     	% John is a thing to represent.
thing(mary).     	% Mary is a thing to represent.
thing(like).     	% Like is a thing to represent.
thing(relationship(john, like, mary)).
                  	% The relationship "john like mary"
                  	% is a thing to represent.

Query to determine the relator or the verb instead of the relationship.

?- thing(relationship(john, Relator_Verb, mary)).

Relator_Verb = like ;

One of the questions you (dissappointingly) skipped was:

(Neo)

>>> Enter the following relationships in prolog:
>>> class (john, person).        meaning one of john's class is person
>>> instance (person, john).     meaning one of person's instance is john
>>

(mAsterdam)
>> Are you stating the same fact in two ways or are these two facts? Received on Tue May 02 2006 - 16:04:38 CDT