Act of communication by media

[alanruttenberg]

Given definition is:

An Act of Communication in which some Artifact is used to transfer an Information Bearing Entity from sender(s) to receiver(s).

As it reads, one expects there to be one information bearing entity (a material entity) which moves from sender to receiver. An example that fits would be sending a book by mail.

However, if we look at the subclasses, none of them are of this nature other than mailing. In a facsimile transmission, a copy of information entity (another concretization) is created with a different material information bearer. In Email Messaging there are a whole slew of intermediary information bearers, including, transiently, your monitor screen while you are reading the message, if the message is only to you. When you have multiple recipients it's clear there's a problem. You can't send a book to multiple people all at once.

There's more to say about the hierarchy below Act of Communication - in particular the multiple inheritance that would be generated when you invite someone to something in an email. The BFO pattern would be to have the commissive communications being defined classes in which one or both of the participants gain or realize certain roles.

What I mean by multiple inheritance: If I wanted to define "emailing an invitation" I would have to have that term have two asserted superclasses: Act of Inviting and Act of Communication by Media. It's fine to have a class have inferred multiple superclasses. What we aim for is a single asserted superclass. Single inheritance but polyhierarchy.

[alanruttenberg]

The definition of Message has the same problem.

• An Information Bearing Artifact that is designed to bear some specific Information Content Entity that is relatively brief and to be transmitted from a sender to a recipient.

As written, a letter sent by postal mail would be considered a message, but not one sent over radio, since in the latter case there is no material bearer being transmitted.

There is an alternate definition, with the ambiguity having to do with what "that" refers to. My comment is based on "that" referring to the information bearing artifact. But "that" might also refer to "some specific Information Content Entity". If that is the case then the definition does not suffer the problem I mention above. However, the definition then does not capture the sense the definition offered by wikipedia does. If the latter interpretation is intended, then the sentence should be revised to remove the ambiguity and a different source for the definition should be found.