Difference between syntactic building blocks and formal languages ...

Re:  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2001Dec/0173.html

Quoting from: Ian Horrocks (horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk)

[[
These sorts of problem illustrates just why we need a precisely
defined semantics for our languages. If we allow for two possible
interpretations we may get into all sorts of difficulties:

- it may be impossible to say something in DAML+OIL without stating
  something unintended in RDF (and vice versa)

- it may be impossible to know which of two (possibly conflicting)
  meanings is the intended one
]]

But if we consider RDF\triples to be just syntactic building blocks with no
formal semantics whatsoever, then would we still have this problem?  This
view would mean that the entailments of any statement are only the
entailments that can be infered by the axioms related to the arc label. In
other words property arcs have semantics and entailments, but languages like
DMLS, RDFS don't.  This has the advantage of allowing us to mix and match
all the available properties of all the schema written in or translatable
into NTriples.

Would that work?  If not, why not?

Seth Russell

Received on Friday, 28 December 2001 18:06:40 UTC