Re: Representing quantification in RDF

From: "Seth Russell" <seth@robustai.net>
Subject: Re: Representing quantification in RDF
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 10:55:52 -0700

> From: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
> 
> > > > I don't have any problem with any reasonable syntax for
> quantification.
> > > > The problem is, as usual, in providing a meaning for the syntactic
> > > > constructs.  How are you proposing to do that?
> > >
> > > By also representing the behavior of the system in the same "syntactic
> > > constructs".
> >
> > And how are you going to ground this?  There is no connection between
> > syntax and behavior unless you have some active component in the
> formalism,
> > and there is no such component in RDF or RDFS.
> 
> Every computer has "active components";  they are called programs.  Any
> program can be given a URI;  therefore it can be referred to from the
> "syntactic formalism" of an RDF graph.  We should be able to easily design a
> schema in RDF to point to object oriented programs that would implement any
> known behavior such as the computing of inferred statements.
> 
> Seth


But RDF has no notion of a program, so this doesn't help!  You would need
to have a semantics for a programming language as part of the meaning of RDF.
If you have no idea within RDF of what the active components are doing,
then there is no way to representing anything using these active
components.  

Remember, the idea is not to implement active behavior, the idea is to
incorporate active behavior into RDF.  To do that the active behavior has
to be explained within the semantics for RDF.

Peter Patel-Schneider

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2001 14:23:58 UTC