Place of A3 approach among other approaches
In order to correctly place the A3 approach among others, I will mention the features of
three main existing approaches and explain why they are incomplete for knowledge
representation purposes and for describing the mind content.
The relational model (Codd, 1970) was placed in the basis of database technology and the
entity-relationship approach (Chen, 1976) is successfully used in object management and
UML. Some authors regard a ‚world’ as represented by a database where all data about the
entities of such a world are persisted. Both these two main modeling frameworks, widely
used today in IT and AI implementations, don’t offer the level of precision required by
mathematics. Really, set theory is regarded as the main formalization framework for
mathematics and other disciplines, but the notion of set and ordered pair (treated as „element
of order“ ), not only are not among the primitive notions of these approaches, but are used
uncounsciously. Set theorists know that such attitude to the intuitive notion of set can raise
serious logical contradictions. In software, logical contradictions manifest as bugs.
Therefore, the software for representation of mind content developed according approaches
which unconsciously treat the basic operations of mind will, probably, have „conceptual
bugs“ in their specification and will not work.
The sound mathematical foundation of Semantic Web is reflected in its standards by
formulation of semantics of standards in the language of set theory. But Semantic Web is
focused on the discourse about the Universe, rather than the representation of the Universe.
The representation capabilities are an essential feature of an intelligent agent, and a
representation framework missing in Semantic Web might be responsible for the fact that, so
far, there is no proposal of a generic agent for processing the Semantic Web data.