Nicholas --

You wrote:

If you really want unambiguous context information, it ought be spelled out in a way that is sufficiently formal and sound to make reasoning valuable and useful.

I'd suggest that a representation shift can help with this.

As you may know, we have been suggesting that reasoning directly with open vocabulary English can help to solve these kinds of problems. Why describe the problem and its solution in English, then try to solve it in a non-English notation? That's the source of most of the problems.

Although reasoning directly with open vocabulary English may sound like blue sky, there is a system that does this, albeit with a subtle trade off to avoid dictionary construction yet get precise English semantics. (The underlying logical semantics is model-theoretic.)

The system is live, online, with a number of Ontology and other examples, at the site below. The author- and user interface is simply a browser. The approach is described in the e-Government presentation. There's also a recent paper at http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/paper/19 .

Thanks in advance for comments.

-- Adrian

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