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Re: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:21:03 -0500
Message-Id: <p06001f09bcefea415ef5@[10.0.100.12]>
To: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
Cc: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, JohnBlack@deltek.com, public-sw-meaning@w3.org

>* Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> [2004-06-11 08:29-0400]
>>
>>
>>  >From Peter F. Patel-Schneider:
>>  > In any case, there are indeed already more-or-less standard ways of doing
>>  > much of what you appear to want.
>>
>>  I'm inclined to agree.
>
>Likewise.

+1. And I would further add, that if you want to do this stuff in a 
SWeb-explicit way, all the tools are available for doing this.  By 
all means come up with a suggestion: there are several already, eg 
see 
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/SWTSGuide/carroll-iswc2004.pdf 
for one.

>
>In practice, the way I have been doing this is just to treat
>RDF/XML documents much the way I treat XHTML XML documents, or other
>text files. They are things with properties such as creator, creation
>date, checksum etc. And as textual documents, they can be digitally
>signed, encrypted etc. with widely available tools such as PGP.
>
>When I write an RDF file that is important enough that I want others to
>know that (a) I wrote it, (b) it hasn't been subsequently changed, I
>just include markup in the document that mentions me as the author, and
>points to the results of PGP signing it.
>
>Coming up with a formal account of all this would be hard work,

Well, except that the work has already been done :-)  See above.

>but the
>basic approach of treating RDF documents as having common
>characteristics with other document formats seems a plausible and
>pragmatic way of making progress.

Indeed. In fact it seems hard to see how to stop people doing this, 
even if one were inclined to want to stop them.

Pat


>cheers,
>
>Dan


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Received on Friday, 11 June 2004 19:21:04 GMT

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