Re: Social Meaning Boston 6 March

pat hayes wrote:

>>> that any social meaning applied to RDF usage at least be *conformant*
>>> to the formal meaning.
>>
>>
>> But what does it mean to conform?
>
>
> BE such as would be preserved under valid (according to the MT) 
> entailments. 


I would like to see a test case of that.  Let me propose one and you can 
tell me if I am close.   Suppose there is a web service [A] that adds a 
person's name to a database when it discovers a  RDF document which 
asserts that he\she is a person.  For example someone publishes the 
document [B].  Is the social meaning of document [B] something like [P]: 
 "[A] should add the name 'Pat Hayes' to the person database with the 
email address of  'phayes@ai.uwf.edu' " ?

Document [B] contains the triples:

_:a  rdf:type foaf:Person
_:a  foaf:mbox "phayes@ai.uwf.edu"
_:a  foaf:givenname "Pat"
_:a foaf:surname "Hayes"

If the web service does add your name and email address  to the 
database, is it conforming?  

Now lets say that agent [A] discovers another document [C] which 
contains the triples below:

_:a  rdf:type ex:Bot
_:a  foaf:mbox "sethBot@robustai.net"
_:a  foaf:givenname "SethBot"

and somewhere else [A] discovers [D]:

ex:Bot rdf:subClass foaf:Person

If the web service does *not* add my name to the databse, would you say 
it was *not* conforming ?    

Is that a legitimate example of  "social meaning applied to RDF usage 
being at least be *conformant*  to the formal meaning" ?

Suppose the triple is common knowledge amoung such web services but [A] 
never does discover it.  Has the social meaning of document [C]  
changed?  Has the  conformance of the web service changed ?  

Seth Russell

Received on Thursday, 27 February 2003 14:26:04 UTC