Re: Querying reified statements

William Loughborough wrote:

> At 09:57 AM 12/13/00 -0800, Seth Russell wrote:
> >Whatever RDF is, I think it is safe to say, it is an external language, it
> >is not very useful as your internal knowledge representation.
>
> It may be "safe to say" that it's "not very useful" for that but is that
> really true? Is there something a lot better?

Yes quadruples, or even ntupels.

> [snip]  I guess the "representation" of the knowledge is distinct from
> its "presentation" but it's axiomatic that you "tell 'em what you told 'em"?

Ok, but what's the connection .. why the "but" ?

Any context sensitive external language does not carry inside its strings their
context of utterance.  If I say  [The King has no clothes.], there is no context
information contained inside that linguistic string ... that context information
must be supplied by the hearer of the statement.  RDF is no exception here.  If
somebody asserts the RDF triple [TheKing, notWears, clothes]  and we wish to
interpret that, we must add some context information to our internal databases.
So our internal knowledge goes beyond and contains more information than is
contained in the external presentation language.  I think as we begin to
understand this a lot of the discussions in this interest group will start to
make more sense.

Seth Russell