- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 01:36:03 +0100
- To: "Kremena Gotcheva" <infom@bcci.bg>, "Aaron Swartz" <aswartz@upclink.com>, <yen@cs.tamu.edu>, "Benny Gustavsson" <benny.gustavsson@mailbox.swipnet.se>
- Cc: <semantic-web@w3.org>, <humanmarkup@yahoogroups.com>, "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>
> If meaning is universal, you have to be able to define it
> in an unique machine-parsable way, e.g. translate it
> one-to-one into an URI. Then, however, you jump into an
> discussion that is, in the best case, only a linguistic discours,
> but I believe there is an entire contextual network or even
> many layers of contextual networks below it.
The Semantic Web is built on the idea that there is not an inherent
set of meaning to the Universe, as some of the Knowledge
Representation people would tell you, but that machine should be able
to come to conclusions according to the scope of the information that
they are fed. What the Semantic Web tries to achieve, by using a set
of decentralized identifiers (URIs), is to increase that scope, and
therefore the usefulness of any applications built on top of it.
The Semantic Web can be used to translate between cultural idioms if
you record that information someplace in a repurposable form. At the
moment, you will have a lot of work to do because there aren't enough
persistent ontologies around for you to construct meaningful patterns
that people can investigate and use, but groups such as HumanMarkup
(http://www.humanmarkup.org/) are apparently chartered to fill in the
gaps.
> b.. Or a simpler point: How do you translate into
> Italian "It rains cats and dogs"? In my mother tongue,
> Bulgarian, the idiom says "it rains as if pooring out
> of a tin" which has quite nothing in common, lexically
> or gramatically, with the English one.
This could be modelled in Notation3 (a form of RDF) as:-
[ xml:lang "en"; :language :Bulgarian;
:phrase "it rains as if pouring out of a tin" ]
:idiomaticallyRelatedTo
[ xml:lang "en"; :language :English;
:phrase "it's raining cats and dogs" ] .
Now all we need is for people to build some automatic idiom
translators!
Hope that helps,
--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Saturday, 11 August 2001 20:40:48 UTC