[Attempto] AceWiki entry [...]

[Tobias Kuhn]

George,

>> At the moment, there is no possiblity to load the words from a Clex file into AceWiki.
>> A program that translates from the ACE Lexicon format into the AceWiki data storage
>> format would certainly be nice to have. Are you planning to create such a program?
>
> Yes, it seems straightforward and important.  But a thought occurs.
>
> Should we go in the direction of creating non-thread safe flat files and reinventing the thousand little patches already sewn into full-featured wikis like Wikipedia?  Is your objective now to create a maximally useful and scalable product?  If yes, why continue past proof of concept in framing AceWik in Echo if it can instead be fully clothed in e.g. MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org/)?

That's a justified question.

Before I started developing AceWiki, I considered building it on top of MediaWiki. However, I 
assumed that it would be very difficult to include a user-friendly predictive editor (as the one 
AceWiki has now) into MediaWiki, and I think a good predictive editor is crucial. This was the 
reason why I created AceWiki from scratch.

At the moment, I don't have the time and resources to make AceWiki a stable and practically useful 
tool by myself. However, I would certainly be willing contribute to such an endeavor.

By the way: I once thought about putting AceWiki into a public repository like SourceForge so that 
others could easily contribute code. Would that be something desirable?

>>> How do we specify an optional item, e.g., "Every sentence contains at
>>> least 0 adverbs"?  Entering 0 after "at least" wasn't an option:
>>> the function list starts at 1.
>>
>> Right. That's not possible at the moment. In terms of logic, a sentence like "every
>> sentence contains at least 0 adverbs" does not make much sense, because it is always
>> true. You could replace "adverbs" by "elephants", and the sentence would logically still
>> be true.
>>
>> We are nevertheless considering adding "0" to the ACE grammar in this context. E.g.
>> "every adverb contains 0 sentences" could be a reasonable statement.
>
> But it's also very useful to describe something that may or may not be present.  I don't know where regular expressions fit on the expressivity scale vis-a-vis predicate calculus, but it's sometimes better to search for todos with "to ?do" rather than "to do" or "todo".  And if one want to describe what the world may contain, do we have to settle for "the world contains elephants and eggplant and ..." and make guesses as to whether the world is closed, or can we simply communicate that "The world is all creation, at least 0 Creators, and nothing else"?

In standard logic, you don't need a statement to "describe something that may or may not be 
present". If neither a statement nor its negation is present then it is interpreted as "may or may 
not be true".

For this reason, "every sentence contains at least 0 adverbs" added as a comment has the same effect 
as adding it as an ACE sentence (assuming "0" is supported). This sentence simply contains no 
information. I agree that such statements could nevertheless be useful for a human reader.

> Adding Oracle's demo tables emp and dept (http://www.psoug.org/reference/insert.html) into AceWiki yesterday, I noticed that in some sentences it was clearest to refer to the tables as "demo.emp", sometimes as "emp table", etc.  I think maybe instead of just having abbreviations (a nice feature by the way), each proper noun should have a user-defined set of synonyms, and that clicking a proper noun while in Edit mode drops them down and allows any to be chosen.  Regardless of which is chosen, Attempto continues to see each proper noun's fully qualified "headword", or first representation, only.

I am not sure whether this is a good idea. Shouldn't users in a closed system like AceWiki be forced 
to use the same term if they mean the same thing?

> Also, how would you continue past "Every key column has at most 1" to add "instance of a value"?

Do you mean "every key column has at most 1 thing" where "thing" is a noun that covers everything 
(i.e. "everything is a thing")?

The ACE->OWL translator actually supports this. So it would be easy to support in AceWiki. I put it 
onto my todo list.


Tobias