Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

> > What about Territories and Protectorates like ...
>
> What's required is a semantic database that maps concepts. In a
> hierarchy there may be multiple routes between parent and child. For
> instance you could have Nation as a parent, federations below that and
> the USA below that. Logically the next level down would be the state,
> but it's not that simple. Yes you need a route down from USA to US State
> but you have to recognise that for some purposes DC is a state, and for
> other purposes it isn't. So you need three concepts as siblings; all
> states including DC, all states except DC and DC alone. You may also
> need to consider the contiguous states, Hawaii and Alaska. Then throw in
> Puerto Rico as a sibling to the concept of state within the US.

Below is one way dbd can organize the above:

US

   has

      All from below (Alabama, ....Guam,.... DC) and more    State

      Alabama
      Alaska
      ...
   Contiguous_State
      ... - Alaska -Hawaii
   Non_Contiguous_State
      Alaska, Hawaii, ...
   Republican_State
      ...
   Democratic_State
      ...
   Territory
      Guam, Virgin Islands, ...
   Capital
      DC

however, if the db has enough data and processing rules, it could "normalize" simply to the following:

US
  Alabama, ...
  Guam, ...
  DC
  john, mary, ...

To determine US's captial, db would look for something related to US with following types of attributes:

1) President lives there.
2) Politicians meet there.
3) Major Gov building are there.

To determine US's non-continguous states, db might look for states surrounded by water, or not adjacent to any other state, etc. Among other things, this probably requires quite a bit of memory and processing power to do in split seconds and merely begins to give us an inkling of the human brain's capacity.

> (Oh, and for a 10 point bonus devise a model that permits concepts to be
> added to the model even if they don't have a precise English translation.)

Here I add a concept named concept1:
(new 'concept1 'concept)

Here I add an unnamed concept:
(new)
(set concept instance (it))

How many points did I get :) But in order for the above to be useful, one would need to further relate the concept to other things in the db. What did you have in mind? Received on Mon Jan 15 2007 - 06:25:33 CET