RE: [VM] Draft of 2004-10-25

At 0:30 +0200 10/29/04, Bernard Vatant wrote:
>
[snip]
>I suppose that means that when we use a URI to identify a Term in a 
>Vocabulary, we want to
>identify a *concept* and not its *name*. Otherwise we would have 
>written that a Term is a
>*name for a concept*, and that we use the URI to identify the 
>*name*, not the *concept*.
>This is the classical debate between *terminological* vs 
>*conceptual* views of Vocabulary.
>I don't know if we want to stand clearly on one side of this debate. 
>Some of the
>vocabularies or languages we are about seem to stand clearly on the 
>conceptual side of the
>line. Seems that SKOS does, as Topic Maps Published Subjects do. 
>I've never really been
>sure about RDF and OWL being so definitive about it. In any case, 
>the document should say
>clearly at some point either if it stands on one side, and which, 
>and maybe why that one,
>or if it keeps agnostic, and in this latter case deal with both 
>interpretations. This is a
>very difficult question, but we can't sweep it under the carpet.
>
>Coming back to 3.3, I'm very uneasy with the use of "meaning"(here 
>as anywhere else) and
>it seems that the wording of the issue in fact goes around 
>identification without naming
>it. The question of reuse is practical. If one reuses a term out of 
>its original context,
>to what extent can/should/may semantic applications (including human 
>end-user brains) use
>it for identification process the same way they would have used the 
>original one? So the
>question of "meaning" boils down to "Is it really the same concept, 
>even if it bears the
>same name and URI?". In this question, the key word is not "mean", 
>it's "same".


or, we could point them at any of the thousands of documents written 
debating these questions over the past couple of millenium, and 
actually produce a useful document by explaining what we're trying to 
do and not getting into basic philosophical distractions...

seriously, Bernard, I don't mean to "pooh pooh" the message you 
wrote, these are important issues, but I think for the document I 
understand Thomas to be proposing, we really want to keep a focus on 
the pragmatic issues in what this is all about, instead of getting 
into issues that might be distracting to the digital librarians and 
others that this document could be very useful for...

  -JH

-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

Received on Friday, 29 October 2004 04:16:57 UTC