"Contexts" and EI Models

From: Charles Petrie (petrie@mcc.com)
Reply to: petrie@mcc.com & iceimt@tools.org forum
Tue, 1 Sep 92 13:07:18 CDT


---------------------------------------------------------------- This is part of a response to John Sowa from Pat Hayes on a point about inference methods. I have omitted most of the discussion but left in comments about the "contexts" Guha developed for use in dealing with different theories within CYC.

Enterprise modeling is faced with the problem of connecting different models: different languages and different domains. This is a hard theoretical problem. These comments suggest that Guha's dissertation may help.

If anyone's interested, the MCC report is is ACT-CYC-423-91 and can be requested from Judy Bowman (Bowman@mcc.com).

Charles ******************************************************************

----- Forwarded message # 1:

Received: from uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de by inti.informatik.uni-kl.de id aa05098; 28 Aug 92 18:10 MET DST Received: from venera.isi.edu by uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de id aa17560; 28 Aug 92 18:07 MET DST Received: from herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu by venera.isi.edu (5.65c/5.65+local-6) id <AA27843>; Fri, 28 Aug 1992 09:03:17 -0700 Received: from krazykat.cs.uiuc.edu by herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu with SMTP (5.64+/IDA-1.2.8) id AA20839; Fri, 28 Aug 92 11:03:15 -0500 Message-Id: <9208281603.AA20839@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu> Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 11:05:41 -0600 To: sowa@watson.ibm.com From: phayes@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu Subject: Re: Peirce's rules of inference Cc: INTERLINGUA@isi.edu, SRKB@isi.edu, CG@cs.umn.edu ... . . . >I use the word "context" in a very narrow sense -- I mean it as nothing
>more than a notation for packaging a collection of graphs. .... A [context]
>could contain all the world's knowledge or it could contain just one simple
>atom.

but a few lines later we get a shadow of the more exotic idea again:

> For such systems [CYC-ish], it is important
>to analyze the permissible operations for moving information in and
>out of various contexts (i.e. packages), reasoning within one of those
>packages, and then exporting an answer to another package.

But this notation doesn't preserve any structure whatever, as you have just said: it gives complete freedom to move anything in and out of these scope-contexts.

There is a claim here: that there is a significant idea of a 'context', which is something which plays a nontrivial role in complex tasks of large-scale knowledge representation. This idea, or rather collection of ideas, is new and now being gradually got clear by McCarthy, Guha and others.

... . . .

----- End of forwarded messages



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