[Mulgara-dev] ITQL

[Paul Gearon]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Life is hard, and then you die
<ronald at innovation.ch> wrote:
> I understand that we're querying over an open-world, and I'm perfectly
> fine with statements being returned that weren't explicitly entered,
> and I'm fine with the "implicit" graph.
>
> My issue that is we're and'ing two contraints, and a conjunction of A
> and B usually returns less than (or same as) A, not more, i.e.
> A ⊆ A ⋂ B, for all B.

My point is that you're never seeing all the possible results. A lot
of the extrinsic possible results are never shown, usually because
there's not enough context to know which are valid for you. By
constraining things more, then the possible results go from "infinite"
down to "another infinite" that's smaller than the first one. The
difference here is that the smaller result set contains more valid
statements ("valid" means "true in all interpretations"), so you're
able to return a larger set. I guess it's an irony that you have more
valid statements when the number of consistent statements is reduced.
:-)

Paul