- From: Jos De_Roo <jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com>
- Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 00:09:29 +0200
- To: "Brian McBride <bwm" <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>, RDF Core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>, w3c-rdfcore-wg-request@w3.org
[...] >entails > > <jenny> foo:age _:l . > <film> foo:shoeSize _:l . >I believe we all agree this entailment holds. > > >>apparently meaning that Jenny's age is the same as John's shoe size. > >'Apparently' being the key word. But your argument seems to contain the >logical fallicy that you have taken an abstract token (well two actually, >"age" and "shoesize") that name an abtract logical thing and inserted them >directly into a natural language sentence and are then suggesting >inconsistency. That is too easy a game to play: > > <John> foo:isa foo:girl. > >apparently saying that John isa girl. > >There is a famous paper I recall reading, by Drew McDermott I think, (I >don't have a reference to hand) which makes the point that one must be >careful about reading things into the text names we give things that are >not really there in the logic. Neither FOL nor a machine interprets the >tokens "age" or "shoesize" as having anything to do with time or feet. > >It is a useful test in cases like this, to replace those terms that might >be suggestive to a human, with meaningless terms: > > <a> <b> _:l . > <c> <d> _:l . > >and see if your argument still holds. Brian, this is hitting the nail and as Pat wrote [[[ A good exercise for anyone dealing with a formal ontology is to replace every 'word' by a meaningless string, and then try to understand the assertions in the ontology. Because the ontology means *exactly the same* as far as any software is concerned. ]]] -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2001Dec/0091.html and that was for me a real lesson -- , Jos De Roo, AGFA http://www.agfa.com/w3c/jdroo/
Received on Thursday, 3 October 2002 18:10:46 UTC