Conbulary

The Conbulary is a controlled vocabulary for Mainertion, the “main assertion set”.

The Initial Colon

An initial colon marks the root of the name space.

The Inner Colon

A colon between two clauses creates a new clause: The so-called “free combination” of both clauses. Given a clause "A" and a clause "B", then "A:B" is a clause and its meaning is “free”, i.e., it can be defined freely and not be derived from the meaning of "A" or "B". This operator is left-associative, so that "A:B:C" is the free combination of "A:B" and "C".

The Slash

The slash "/" is used between to clauses, when the right clause is in an "is a"-relation to the left clause. So "A/B" means that "B" that is a kind of "A", for example "number/12" is the number "12", while the meaning of "number:12" has to be specified separately.

To get unique paths the subset notation must be chosen, whenever possible, to avoid that a notion is split into two notions (one with a colon and one with a slash).

Brackets

To escape a text to be contained within a notion, it has to be written within brackets.

I.e., in "URI/[http://example.com]", the colon and the slashes of the URI are being escaped.

FAQ

=    Why is there no notation for subsets (the each-is-a-relation)?

This might lead to ambiguities. For example, a planet is a concept, so it has the path ":concept/planet". But the concept planet also is a subset of all concepts, because its elements are also concepts, such as used in the path ":concept/planet/earth".

If there was a subset notation like ":concept|planet" then the path of concept might be both the path ":concept/planet" or the path ":concept|planet", which is not wanted.

This ambiguity could be resolved by a rule, that requires to choose the subset notation only when the element notation does not apply.