Pat,  (01)
Database designers would agree with that, although they
wouldn't use that terminology:  (02)
 > All of which suggests to me that any KR system that has
 > to resort to Skolemization is not providing the proper
 > engineering support for good ontology construction.  (03) 
In the earlier discussion about functional dependencies
in database relations, I should point out that the
methodologies for DB design recommend that a good design
should minimize complex dependencies within a relation.  (04)
The DB gurus would approve of a relation that had an
employee id as the key (the argument or arguments on
which all other arguments are functionally dependent)
and then one or more dependent arguments, such as
department, manager, salary, etc.  (05)
But they strongly recommend that any relations with
transitive or criss-crossing functional dependencies
should be broken into two or more simpler relations.
They call that process "normalization" and define
several different "normal forms" that are recommended.  (06)
John  (07)
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