[sc34wg3] SAM-issue term-scope-def

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Bernard Vatant
|
| [...] so the full sentence is:
| 
| "This TM states that: if this scope applies, then A is valid"

OK.
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 2 and 3 are very interesting, however. What they imply to me is that
| we need to define the notion of a context in which topic
| characteristic assignments are evaluated. They are either considered
| valid (if the scope matches) or invalid (if the scope does not match).
 
* Bernard Vatant
|
| I understand what you say here as:
| "A is valid *if and only if* scope applies" ...

Yes. Valid, not necessarily true. If the topic map has "X instanceOf Y
in scope Z", and you set context scope to "W", and ask "is X an
instanceOf Y" the system will have to say "no".
 
| That does not seem consistent with what you say elsewhere; I
| understood you supported:
| 
| "If scope applies, then A is valid"

That was when we were talking about truth. But I don't think truth and
validity are the same.
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| It's not that I disagree with your maths, Bernard, or that I don't
| want to use maths, but I think we need to either have a spec
| completely grounded in maths or completely divorced from it.
 
* Bernard Vatant
|
| I don't figure how a specification pretending to define in a
| non-ambiguous way fundamental objects, relationships between these
| objects, and rules about those relationships (is not that what SAM
| is about?) 

It sure is.

| could be completely "divorced from maths" (be they mine or others
| BTW) or at least from common logic. What I am about is not here a
| formal mathematical model, but checking elementary logic, 

There is a little bit of natural language set theory and logic in
there now, but I've chosen to use natural language for those things
precisely for this reason. But in a sense you are right. Some things
are needlessly much harder to say without maths.

| e.g. if scope declaration supports a necessary condition, or a
| sufficient condition, or both ...
 
Have you read the document? If not, please do, and give concrete
comments on it. If you have, how would you work something like this
into it? That is, could you turn that sentence into an instruction
that an editor could have some hope of following?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| That's why I like this approach: I think it would allow us to
| clear this up in the natural language specification (SAM) and give
| a future mathematical specification something more precise to
| start from.
| 
| Does that make sense to you, Bernard?
 
* Bernard Vatant
|
| Well. I must confess I've never understood the whole process. We've
| started with syntax with no model, now try to figure an application
| model in natural language, and then maybe we'll try to have a
| mathematical or formal model ... 

Correct.

| but what if both syntax and "natural language specification divorced
| from maths" contain such hidden inconsistencies that nobody will
| never be able to build a consistent model of them? So even if SAM is
| not expressed in maths language, which I fully agree with, it has to
| be checked for consistency of its implicit underlying model rules.

How? By whom? What sorts of inconsistencies could there be? What would
their effects be?

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >