Proposed response to ISSUE-159

David, greetings.

This is the response of the RDF Working Group to your comment, CCd below, suggesting a change to the RDF Semantics, tracked by the Working Group as ISSUE-159.

The material to which you refer in the 2004 Semantics document appears there as introductory "tutorial" prose at the start of section 1.3 which contains the definition of simple interpretation. This definition of simple interpretation appears, slightly modified, in the 2013 RDF 1.1 Semantics document in Section 4. While the section titles and numbers are changed, and the introductory material has been removed, the normative definitions in the RDF 1.1 document are very similar to, and stated in the same order as, those in the 2004 RDF document. Neither document defines a general notion of interpretation. 

The omission of "tutorial" material is deliberate, and part of a WG editorial decision that the primary purpose of the Semantics document is to give a precise account of the semantics to readers who are familiar with the basic ideas of model-theoretic semantics, rather than serve as an introduction to the subject for the lay reader. The WG received some strong feedback to the effect that the 2004 documents were too long and 'heavy', motivating the editorial purging of extraneous text.  For these reasons, we do not intend to incorporate such material into the normative RDF 1.1 Semantics.

This WG looks forward to the creation of one or more "Primer" documents written with the express aim of explaining RDF to users who are unfamiliar with the basic ideas. The material which you refer will probably be incorporated, perhaps with slightly different wording, in such a Primer. 

Please reply to public-rdf-comments@w3.org indicating whether this message responds adequately to your comment.



On Oct 9, 2013, at 9:41 PM, David Booth wrote:

> Regarding
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-rdf11-mt-20130723/
> 
> Section 4 of the RDF Semantics is careful to define all of the major terms that are used within the document . . . except one.  AFAICT, the general notion of an "interpretation" is nowhere defined.  Later in the document, specific kinds of interpretations are defined, such as Simple Interpretations, RDF Interpretations and RDFS Interpretations.  But AFAICT a definition of the general notion of an interpretation is completely absent.
> 
> The 2004 version of the semantics had a very nice explanation of the notion of interpretations:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/#interp
> and it had a glossary definition of the term:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/#glossInterpretation
> 
> I don't know why the current draft eliminated those sections, but somehow the RDF Semantics needs to explain what is meant by an "interpretation", since the notion is central to the semantics.
> 
> I would suggest restoring the explanation from the 2004 version, but I would be fine with some other replacement instead.
> 
> Thanks,
> David
> 
> 

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Received on Saturday, 12 October 2013 04:04:29 UTC