Re: in defense of standards

On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 10:26, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> 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.

I don't expect that architecture to produce a useful system. It doesn't
encourage Joe Baseball Card Trader to publish his baseball card
ontology. I hope to elaborate separately.

> 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
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 14:14:18 UTC