[MUD-Dev] OpenCyc, design implications of ontological systems ?

[Robert Zubek]

From: Sean Kelly [mailto:sean at ffwd.cx] 

> So a Mammal is an instance of a BiologicalSpecies, but you
> obviously can't create an instance of type Mammal (in OO terms).
> The simplest means of representation would be to have all internal
> nodes be abstract classes, and only the actually instantiable
> classes be concrete (pretty standard OO stuff).  All instances of
> a parent could be found by an in-order traversal of the
> inheritance heirarchy.

So you mean that every node would convey
generalization/specialization through the object hierarchy, like
before, but now also carry an internal collection of 'instances' and
'parents' - and only let the leaf nodes be actual OO instances of
those nodes?

This might work, although I wonder what would happen if one
attempted to then instantiate off a leaf node? In a compiled
language this isn't much of a worry, though - the pre-processor can
always just recompute the hierarchy...

Rob

--
Robert Zubek
rob at cs.northwestern.edu 
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~rob
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