RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

> From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider
> Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 7:00 AM
> 
> From: "John Black" <JohnBlack@deltek.com>
> Subject: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?
> Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:17:54 -0400
> 
> > So here is what it looks like to me.
> > 
> > A general purpose communication system, where:
[snip]
> > Its a new, artificial language but there is no standard way for 
> > fixing or learning the intended interpretation of its 
> terms, URIrefs.
> 
> Well determining (all of) an ``intended'' interpretation is 
> generally not
> possible.  All that a formal language can do is provide 
> information that
> can be used to narrow down the formal interpretation of a term.  There
> already is a standard mechanism (owl:imports) that allows for 
> the inclusion
> of the meaning of one Semantic Web document (written in OWL) 
> in another.
> What more is needed at this point?

I think there should be a means for creating names, i.e., for creating 
rigid designators, as in Kripke, that could be used in all 
interpretations to designate the same thing. And I think there should 
be a standard way to find out what it is intended that it be used for 
with machine readable data, natural language, images, and anything 
else necessary to fix its reference. That comes out sounding 
like what URIs were said to be, at least the URL kind, at least 
if you put related stuff there (also Pat's 'rather lame' example 
http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/PatHayes What is lame about it?). 
And I suppose in many cases it could be a definite description 
imported into a graph. But don't definite descriptions fall apart 
if there is an internal inconsistency? or if the context changes 
and its no longer definite?

I think we also need in-line imports with scopes over the triple, 
and URI level. The last, with URI scope, to be used to import the 
data at the location provided by the names described above. The 
ones with triple scope would apply to a single triple and have 
no effect on the other triples in the graph. Then I could slice 
and dice my graphs at the triple level and not lose my meaning.

And if we are going to corral the whole power of the web into 
imports, how about query-imports, conditional-imports, 
deep-closure-imports, and the like.

John

> > [1] The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction 
> > http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/semprag.html
> > 
> > 
> > John Black


> Peter F. Patel-Schneider

Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2004 19:51:40 UTC