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Names

Names can be written in Metalog in a simple way: by enclosing them within double quotes. Therefore, in the initial example that we have seen the names are "John_Smith", "http://www.example.com/staff", "is", "http://www.relationships.com/verbs" and "tall like a tower". Sometime, when expressing concepts on the Web, it is useful to associate a name within the context of a web address. This is what we have seen with the two representations

JOHN represents the person "John_Smith" from the company "http://www.example.com/staff".
IS represents "is" from "http://www.relationships.com/verbs".

where the intent is to specify that the name "John_Smith" has to be interpreted within the context given by the web address "http://www.example.com/staff". This is done in Metalog using the special keyword from. So, in order to write a name, and then specify that its context can be found in some other place, we can write the name, then the "from" keyword, and then that other name. These three parts then all concur into forming this kind of "qualified name', a name with a context.

Of course, such names can be used in every Metalog sentence, not just in representations. For example, instead of the Metalog sentence

JOHN IS "tall like a tower".

we could have written the perfectly legal Metalog sentence

"John_Smith" from the company "http://www.example.com/staff" "is" from "http://www.relationships.com/verbs" "tall like a tower".

The problem is, as you can see, that such qualified names tend to be quite long, and consequently also to make sentences rather hard to read. Therefore, good stlye Metalog sentences can be made much more readable with an appropriate use of representations, avoiding direct use of such long names in assertions or queries.

Finally, note that words can only be either lower case, or upper case: no mixed-case words can be used (apart from inside a name). So, you cannot write things like

JOHN IS Certainly "tall like a tower".