- From: Bill dehOra <BdehOra@interx.com>
- Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 17:33:45 -0000
- To: "'Sean B. Palmer'" <sean@mysterylights.com>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
:Most people could easily understand that Notation3... but a :machine doesn't :cogitate it, it just parses (and possibly remembers) the triple, and :assigns "Sean B. Palmer" (a string literal) as the :hasAuthor :property of that URL. Cogitation by machines or humans is irrelevant here. I'm not making myself clear. I'll try again: what mechanism is to be used to bind a semantically empty string to a property, on the web, using rdf language? Binding that string to a URI isn't adequate in itself and I think it's an error to conflate a unique entity with a meaningful one. In other words, what "Sean B. Palmer"?, the machine :doesn't know :anything about that string beyond that fact. :However, if I tied it in with something unique (a URI):- Only useful if that URI in turn has associated semantics; in RDF this occurs presumbly by having properties over that URI. That still doesn't indicate a binding mechanism in the first instance. : :> So given that predicates such as loves will impose ambiguity, : :Not really, it's just a property. If I searched for any :bill :that :loves ::scotch, then I could find it on an SW engine, couldn't I? :That's enough... :the machine doesn't have to understand what "love" is :-) I never said it did or should or can. It has to be able to ground the term, determine possible semantics and compute which semantics are to be applied within a process that can start inferencing over the subject and object bound in turn to that property. I grant you that "namespaced:loves", "tomahto:tomato", "tomayto:tomato" and suchlike really gets you out of a hole with controlling any such ambiguity (on the assumption that programs which share terms share processes). :But also, don't :forget that the Semantic Web is a machine processable Web intended for :humans... Carts and horses. When the web is presented to a person that person will impose semantics. That doesn't in any way make a web with machine processable semantics. I'm sorry if I'm being a PITA about this, but it's important to avoid invoking generalised AI handwaving and automagicking demons. -Bill
Received on Friday, 19 January 2001 12:34:23 UTC