Re: in defense of standards

From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
Subject: Re: in defense of standards 
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 11:07:50 -0400

[...]

> What kind of statement do you imagine we might produce?  Would it talk
> about people and software agents and what they may/should/must do?
> 
>     -- sandro

Well, since you ask, I imagine that we could produce a three-part
statement:

1/ The SW meaning of a set of SW documents in a SW language is completely
   determined from the normative specification of the SW language and the
   contents of these SW documents.

2/ The meaning of a set of SW documents does not necessarily include any of
   the meaning of any other document, except for those SW documents whose
   meaning is explicitly required to be a part of the meaning of the SW
   documents by the normative specification of the SW language and the
   contents of these SW documents.

3/ Applications are free to augment this meaning, perhaps by including the
   meaning of other SW documents, but are prohibited from indicating that
   this augmented meaning is part of the meaning that comes from the SW
   language.

So, as far as RDF is concerned, the meaning of a set of SW documents in
RDF/XML is determined solely from the RDF graph that results from the
parsing of these documents and is not dependent on the contents of
any other document.   OWL extends this to bring in the meaning of
imported documents.

peter

Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 11:30:40 UTC