Every road answers a competency question

Answers Epistemology

Every relationship the registry declares, other than the grounding every kind makes, is walked by at least one declared pattern of its grain. A vocabulary road is walked by a question or a shape; a record road by a record shape. A road no pattern walks is refused.

What goes wrong without it

An ontology is evaluated by the competency questions it can answer, and a relationship nobody asks about is a claim the model makes and never tests. The private platform this model learned from declared hundreds of verbs and asked about few of them, and the unasked ones were where the vague ones lived. Holding every road to a pattern is what keeps the grammar the size of what is used, and it is what gives every application above the ground a road beneath it.

What proves it — 1

Each is a gate the build runs: a check inside a ring, a whole ring, or an eval beside them. A build stops at the first that refuses.

• registry integrityroads are walked
  Every relationship the registry declares, other than the grounding every kind makes, is walked by at least one pattern of its grain: a vocabulary road by a question or a shape, a record road by a record shape. A road no pattern walks answers no competency question, and a grammar that grows ahead of what is asked of it is the drift this refuses.

Derived from — 2

• Grüninger and Fox, IJCAI-95 Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing, 1995Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies
• Uschold and Gruninger, The Knowledge Engineering Review 11(2), 1996Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications

Where this model stands

FND-035 refuses a road walked by no pattern of its grain; on the first run twenty-one roads were unwalked, the whole tactic level among them, and fifteen questions of one or two roads each and one record shape, the campaign roll-up, now walk them.

Every question is answered from every row of its root kind where the walk is non-empty, so a road once walked has a page above it for every place it holds.

What it does not claim

A road may be walked by a shape and asked about by no question; the law asks for a pattern, and a question is the stronger form a later pass may require.

RUL-051