Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!rutgers!gatech!udel!burdvax!finin@antares
From: finin@antares (Tim Finin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: FRL
Keywords: FRL, instantiation
Message-ID: <7104@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>
Date: 28 Jul 88 23:18:06 GMT
References: <576@crin.crin.fr>
Sender: news@PRC.Unisys.COM
Reply-To: finin@antares (Tim Finin)
Organization: Unisys - Paoli Research Center   Paoli, PA
Lines: 25
In-reply-to: napoli@crin.crin.fr (Amedeo NAPOLI)

In article <576@crin.crin.fr>, napoli@crin (Amedeo NAPOLI) writes:
>Who can tell me the semantics of the slot "classification" in the frame based
>language FRL (Goldstein, Roberts 1977) ?
>This slot may be assigned with either "generic" or "individual".
>What do these values actually mean ? In particuliar, is it possible to
>instantiate again a frame that has "individual" in its classification slot.
>Moreover, is the language still available and, if so, how can I get it ?

As I recall, FRL didn't assign any semantics to the classification
slot.  It was, however, commonly used by applications to differentiate
frames which represented generic objects from those representing
individual ones.  What this meant, exactly, was usually very
application dependent.  In fact, the difficulty in deciding what such
a distinction should mean in general in FRL and similar early frame
representation languages was the focus of a lot of discussion and
research in the early eighties.  One result was the architecture used
in many representation systems which includes an object oriented
descriptive component and an expression oriented assertional
component.  Information about individuals is then relegated to the
assertional component.
-- 
  Tim Finin			finin@prc.unisys.com
  Paoli Research Center		..!{psuvax1,sdcrdcf,cbmvax}!burdvax!finin
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