Talk:Applying general information

From Opasnet
Revision as of 10:37, 8 February 2008 by Mikko Pohjola (talk | contribs) (-- ~~~~)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

-- Mikko Pohjola 12:37, 8 February 2008 (EET)

Development of the idea of general information

Previously, it was thought that the general information should be described by using scoping categories. These were categories like age, species, media, and so on. The purpose was to 1) help searcher, 2) provide a means to inherit information. However, this method was found inefficient, and it was not used in practice.

The inheritance of properties was originally restricted to causal functions and plausibilities. This limitation was not useful, and basically anything can be inherited. In addition, instead of "scoping categories", we now talk about "classes", which is the appropriate term from the set theory (a branch of mathematics).