Re: [pedantic-web] Re: The OWL Ontology URI

On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 21:56 -0400, David Booth wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 10:31 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
> [ . . . ]
> > "Other things, such as cars and dogs (and, if you've printed this document on physical
> > sheets of paper, the artifact that you are holding in your hand), are resources too.
> > They are not information resources."
> > 
> > so w:InformationResource is disjoint with cars, dogs, and pieces of paper.
> > 
> > That suggests fairly strongly that it's disjoint with people, but doesn't
> > say so exactly. How about Graphs? Integers? I don't find any compelling
> > argument based solely on ratified specs and/or decisions of the TAG.
> 
> It is pointless to make claims about what is or isn't disjoint with
> w:InformationResource when we do not have either a formal definition --
> a set of assertions -- of w:InformationResource or of "dog", "person",
> etc.  If we make up RDF definitions of those terms *then* we can talk
> about what is disjoint and what isn't.
> 
> Furthermore, as I've pointed out before, there is no architectural
> *need* to define w:InformationResource as disjoint with something like
> sumo:Person (from the SUMO upper ontology).

I'm sympathetic to the point that there's no architectural need
to define w:InformationResource.

But it seems to me that 

 "Other things, such as cars and dogs... are not information resources."

is sufficiently precise that reading it as

 sumo:Dog owl:disjointFrom w:InformationResource.

is trivial.

[...]
> I know of no other reasonable and general way to define the identity of
> a resource than by specifying a set of assertions that constrain it.

For general engineering purposes, that's my sense too.

But on a tangentially related, philosophical note, I found this
somewhat eye-opening:

 Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?

 Eliezer_Yudkowsky
 14 April 2008
 http://lesswrong.com/lw/ph/can_you_prove_two_particles_are_identical/



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Thursday, 13 May 2010 15:32:56 UTC