[Attempto] Some questions about Attempto

[Kaarel Kaljurand]

Hi,

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 03:58, Russell Allen <mail at russell-allen.com> wrote:
> I'm coming from a law background, so I'm thinking of statements or rules such as:
>
> James was born on 12 September 1972.
> Books published before 1923 are in the public domain in the United States.
> In this Act, cattle includes any horse, mare, gelding, colt, foal, filly, ass, mule, bull, cow, ox, steer, heifer, calf, ram, ewe, sheep, lamb, pig, goat, deer, alpaca, llama, vicuna, camel, or dromedary, and every hybrid or cross thereof.

I would write these examples in ACE like this:

(1) James' birthday is "1972-09-12".

(2) If a book's publication-date is X and X < "1923" then the book is
a US-public-domain-book.

(3.1) Every horse is a cattle.
(3.2) Every mare is a cattle.
...

(4) Everything whose father is a cattle and whose mother is a cattle
is a cattle.

As Norbert said, there is no real support for talking about time in
ACE. I've used strings like "1972-09-12", which at the DRS level
simply become string('1972-09-12'). Your reasoner must be able to
interpret them as dates in case you want to do temporal reasoning.

Also, you cannot use meta statements like "In this Act" in ACE. This
you have to model at the level of the application, e.g. either
including or not including a certain ACE text in the reasoning process
or UI etc.

--
kaarel