Re: [xtm-wg] Red shoe, implicit context and metalevel (Re : Equivalence ...)

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Bernard Vatant, this is wonderful.  Although I had reduced my example to the
simplest form I could to highlight the essentials, what you have brought up
is in my view of great importance to "semantic"-based endeavours.  In fact,
I have always maintained a skeptical eye on ideas like the "Semantic Web"
for this reason - exciting though they may be to imagine.

> [Tom]
>
> > "Shoe #257 is red"

[Bernard]
>
> There is always a context to make a statement meaningful, so maybe we can
> imagine some implicit pieces of context here.
>
> 1. A single shoe is considered, which is quite unusual. Shoes usually go
by
> pairs.
> 2. It's identified by a number, looking like it's an object in a weird
> collection (I assume it's some criminal affair, where this shoe is an
> exhibit found in the car next to the victim).
> 3. A shoe, at ordinary temperature, is not a red-light-emitting object.
Red
> color is through reflection. So the "is red" property is not defined
without
> lighting conditions (daylight or some light source with a spectrum broadly
> equivalent to daylight). If the lighting does not contain the red part of
> the spectrum, this shoe may look black or deep green or whatever.
>
[Tom]
In a former life where I manufactured (non-computer) hardware, I had
occasion to deliver equipment pointed a color defined by a US federal
standard for colors.  Such a standard includes ways to perform testing, so
that referencing that standard actually brings in some of the the context
you are talking about.

Although I didn't say so, I was thinking about that when I used the uri of

http://standards.org/color/red

in a few of the examples.  I imagined that the uri referred to such a
standard, thus bringing in that part of the context.  Of course, you would
want to have a way to specify what role the standard plays.  In a
specification or contract for hardware painted the color, you might read
"Cabinets shall be painted with paint meeting MIL-STD-xxxyyyy, class 3.
Cabinet color shall meet astm-zzz-1998, Green # 258."  For a TM, you'd need
some predefined topics to capture these kind of constraints, I would think.

[Bernard]
> Therefore, at the opposite of the very short TM proposed by Steve - with a
> lot of implicit in it - one could consider a more verbose one, pushing up
> the implicit to a more abstract and general meta-level. BTW, this has
> something to do with the present debate about recursivity, meta-level and
> such. You put the implicit-explicit fronteer at an arbitrary level,
assuming
> that the implicit context is the same one for every user of the statement.
> Below is one example of XTM expression of the same statement "with
context".
> Note that a part of the context is expressed as scope (daylight), and a
part
> as a complete association expliciting the situation in which we are led to
> speak about the shoe's color (exhibit-file)
>

[Tom]
I'm still studying your post. Thanks for the contribution.

Regards,

Tom P


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