Re: Difference between syntactic building blocks and formal languages ...

Seth--

If we consider RDF triples to have no formal semantics:

a.  I don't understand how we can say any triples have property arcs 
(or, for that matter, what a "property" is for them to have).

b.  I don't understand how we could then use RDF for even simple 
metadata (like "the creator of <foobar> is John");  it seems to me under 
your scheme we'd have to use some language built on top of RDF to do 
even that (which people might do anyway, but that's another issue).

--Frank



Seth Russell wrote:

> 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
> 
> 


-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
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