Re: Quick -comments summary upto and including 2003-02-13

At 11:08 AM 2/21/03 -0600, pat hayes wrote:

>>Thanks Jan, great work again:
>>
>>At 11:42 14/02/2003 +0000, Jan Grant wrote:
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>>Bob MacGragor on Statings "Much ado about nothing"
>>>
>>>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0211.html
>>>         Call to ditch semantics section 3.2.1. Maybe Brian should
>>>         pick this up?
>>
>>This is a comment on the semantics doc, so I see it as Pat's bailiwick.
>
>I have replied to the original email and subsequent debate. If its 
>considered a Pat-editorial, then I propose to deny this request, end.
>
>However I thought it was best considered by the whole WG, if only briefly, 
>as there seems to have been quite a lot of headscratching and moaning 
>about this section.

I agree.  I also am thinking that a number of comments of this kind arise 
because the formal semantics is very much not the whole story, and the 
RDFcore work is not the end of formal semantics in RDF.

When reading some comments about Bags, etc, I got the feeling that we 
really do want to designate some vocabulary now with a clear 
informally-specified meaning so that people can use it.  At some point in 
the future, semantic extensions may formalize those meanings.

RDF is part of an evolving framework, not an end in itself.  I happen to 
believe that the RDF core represents an important staging point of limited 
functionality:  it may be seriously incomplete as an agent or ontology 
language, but for many of the applications that motivated RDF (e.g. PICS), 
and others developed since (e.g. Dublin Core, CC/PP, Brian's P3P work, 
Patrick's OpenBook(?), etc.) I think it represents a very useful trade-off 
of functionality and complexity that meets some present 
requirements.  Therefore, I think the lack of formalizations for some 
aspects of RDF "meaning" is not an indication that RDF is seriously deficient.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2003 12:19:57 UTC