RE: Outstanding Issues - rdfms-xmllang

On 24/02/2002 22:22:28 Pat Hayes wrote:
> As I won't be at the F2F, my 2c worth of comment on this issue:
>
> >
> >-  The above seems to suggest that degrees of fuzziness are required, at
> >    user option, as with regular search engines.
>
> Fuzziness of matching is not acceptable for RDF: it would break every
> inference engine ever written.

In that case these inference engines either do not handle text or else
they only handle text in a known language.

> Language tagging is largely incidental
> to proposed RDF usage in any case, as RDF is not intended to be read
> by human beings.

What's that got to do with it?  It is intended to be "read" by engines.
Reading implies "understanding" in the sense of being able to make
"decisions" (such as A and B are the same).  Understanding of text
requires knowledge of the language.  I walk on the pavement every day in
London.  If I did so in the US, I'd be dead within a few minutes.

> Also bear in mind that most proposed RDF usage is
> not concerned with text.

Where is this documented?  It certainly was very much concerned with
text when the original RDF M&S WG (of which I was a member) did its
work.  In most use cases, the "literals" were text (as opposed to dates,
numbers etc).

> >-  All of the above is closely related to other "control" constructs
> >    needed for correctly writing text in different languages, eg BiDi
> >    controls for BiDirectional languages.  Though Math(s) is a language
> >    in quite a different sense, the same problem arises.  Let's say the
> >    title of a paper contains something that can't be expressed in plain
> >    text, eg an integral from value A to value B.  How do I do this in
> >    RDF
>
> I would say that RDF deals with Unicode strings. How to encode an
> integral in Unicode is someone else's problem.

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear.  How to encode an integral is a
solved problem: MathML solved it.  How to make use of this in RDF is an
RDF problem.

> >and how will others match on it?
>
> Again, someone else's problem. Intelligent text retrieval is a large
> research area, but it is also largely independent of ontology
> language design. RDF does not have the resources to do both jobs. at
> once.

I'm not sure what you mean by text retrieval.  Are you suggesting that
all/most RDF literals will be numbers, dates etc?

Misha

> Pat Hayes
>
>
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Received on Sunday, 24 February 2002 20:04:27 UTC