[RuleML-all] Re: RE: [Jdrew-all] Questions regarding RuleML status

[Bart Orriens]

Hello all,

>Thanks for your persistence!
Also, please accept my apologies here if/when I'm slow >at times.

don't thank me for my persistence yet, might become irritating at some point :-)

concerning the suggestion Harold made for representing modals, being:

<Atom>
  <Rel modal="yes">oblige</Rel>
  <Ind>John</Ind>
  <Ind>Mary</Ind>
  <Atom>
    <Rel in="no">do</Rel>
    <Ind>something</Ind>
  </Atom>
</Atom>

I have no direct problem with this, except for the following: what to do if we wish to combine modalities, for example to express that it is necessary that something will always be the case (combining a modal and temporal logic modality); or to specify something like 'it is possible that something is an obligation'?

The above implies the need for some form of nesting where modal statements can contain other modal statements. It is unclear to me how we could do this in the above like notation. The only way I see is to take the above and do something like

<Atom>
  <Rel modal="yes">possible</Rel>
  <Atom>
     <Rel modal="yes">oblige</Rel>
     <Ind>John</Ind>
     <Ind>Mary</Ind>
     <Atom>
        <Rel in="no">do</Rel>
        <Ind>something</Ind>
      </Atom>
  </Atom>
</Atom>

This is most likely not correct RuleML syntax, but hopefully you get the idea I'm suggesting. Better alternatives are much appreciated of course.

As a side note, when I'm talking about modality I mean the modality of an atom as a whole. For example, I would like to say something like 'Task A is necessary', in RuleML:

<Atom>
  <Rel modal="yes">necessary</Rel>
  <Atom>
    <oid>
     <Ind>myTask</Ind>
    </oid>
    <Ind>task</Ind>
  </Atom>
</Atom>

Hence why I first suggested using a notation like 

<Necessary>
  <Atom>...</Atom>
</Necessary>

Thoughts, suggestions, remarks always welcome of course.

Cheers,
Bart
=======================================
Drs. Bart Orriens          
B704, Tilburg University 	
PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, 	 
The Netherlands
Phone : +31 13 4662779 
Fax   : +31 13 4663069                 
Email : b.orriens at uvt.nl
Web   : http://infolab.uvt.nl/~borriens   
=======================================