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General Definitions

drasil-bot edited this page Jun 13, 2024 · 4 revisions

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[Captures Jacques' thoughts on the matter as of Oct. 28th, 2018]

After looking a number of examples, I have come to the tentative conclusion that 'general definition' means:

  • semantically, nothing that theory/definition doesn't already mean. So it is not a semantic notion.
  • for exposition, quite a bit. It seems to mean a set of important definitions that sets the context for interpreting the rest of the document. They seem to be called 'general definition' because they actually belong to the body of background knowledge rather than the current more 'specialized' document at hand.

In other words, it might make most sense to view 'General Definition' as a narrative device. How that is handled, exactly, remains to be decided.

Which makes me thing that a number of these definitions should likely be moved to Data.Drasil. That certainly remains to be seen.

On a related matter, currently 'general definition' is basically just a concept plus a relation. While a relation is not wrong, it is quite uninformative in general. Especially as many of the general definitions are, in fact, definitions of one quantity in terms of others. Of course, such equations can easily be re-interpreted as equalities, and thus relations (and possibly even, from there, re-interpreted as being an equation for defining some variable from the rhs in terms of all of the other quantities). At the very least, these definitions should be refined to be more specific about the 'kind' of information conveyed.

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