Re: DBpedia as possible project

"Andrew S. Townley" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.xtm.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi Lars,

On 1 Nov 2010, at 10:10 PM, Lars Heuer wrote:

> 
> If I can play guitar and Badminton, am I an instance of guitarist and
> Badminton player?
> 
> I think "instance of"/"type of" is one of the most misused statements
> at all.


Maybe so, but sometimes where it gets "misused" is at or across context boundaries, isn't it?

Honestly, this is something that I struggle with from time to time too, but basically, to me at least, instance of/type of just means instance A *may* share or include properties associated with type X.

Sometimes, it's handy for things to be a "type" and other times it might not be.  Maybe this boils down to strengths/weaknesses of particular mapping tools and/or implementations, but I think that if there was really a hard and fast answer, we wouldn't see it "misused" quite so often.

What would you say was "correct" usage?  Is it an absolute or a contextually-bound statement?

Genuinely interested in your thoughts on this.

Cheers,

ast
--
Andrew S. Townley <[email protected]>
http://atownley.org
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