Re: Social Meaning Boston 6 March

It has been suggested that I give my take on the meaning of an RDF document.

THEN NEED FOR SPECIFYING THE MEANING OF DOCUMENTS

The web is built as a communications medium by virtue of a stack of
common specifications.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Stack
So, while the content of the web is very decentralized and grows in
an uncontrolled way, this whole decentralized system depends on
a rather mimuimal but essential set of globally agreed standards.
To use the Web is to agree implicitly to follow these standards.
That's how it works.

When a language specification is added to the specs, the goal of the
specification is to provide a step in the stack. Any recipient/reader
of a message in the language, should, when equipped with the specification,
be
able to determine the meaning of the message.  I use these terms loosely,
and most of the layers of the Web specification stack have to date
been defined by engineers with a good deal of thought. There have
been formal models in relatively rare cases, though syntaxes are defined
by grammars, and protocols define message sequnces with finite state
machines and so on.  The OWL terms, beccuase they are purely
mathematical, can be defined in terms of axoims or model theory.

Some langauges are meta-languages in that they create a framework
with which to define further languages. XML and RDF  are examples.
In this cases, the metalangauge spec hands off to a langauge spec in
a well-defined way. XML hands off through the namespace identifier.
RDF has to define how to figure out what an RDF document means.


THE MEANING OF AN RDF DOCUMENT

The meaning of an RDF document I think is well defined in practice,
in that it is the combined (conjunction) of the meanings of each statement,
and the the meaning of a statement is defined by the definitition of
the predicate. The subject, predicate and object are all
IDENTIFIED  by a URI, but the meaning of the statement
if defined by the authority for the predicate, with the
subject and object being parameters to that definition.

That may be for some quick definition without much explanation,

The RDF core group does *NOT* have to concern itself with
how URIs for precicates are allocated,or how specs are
defined.  It does not have to model the social contexts in
which RDF documents have found themselves.

I think some people have been concerned that the specification
in the RDF spec of the meaning of RDF documents would somehow
change or redefine the social contexts in which email messages are
sent and web pages are written.  This is not so.   That is outside the
scope of a the group.

timbl

Received on Friday, 28 February 2003 12:14:14 UTC