Re: the mythical RDF inference engine was: Re: What is truth anyways?

At 05:46 PM 6/12/02 -0500, patrick hayes wrote:
>OK, stop right there. You said OWL is representing facts in RDF. To me 
>that sounds like saying that Im talking English in French: it simply 
>doesn't make sense. Which language are you referring to? RDF or OWL? 
>Because they are *different*.

I heard on the radio recently that linguists have a concept they call 
"cross coding" (or something like that) where people mix words and 
structures from different root languages in their 
conversations.  Popularly, some of these have been raised to the status of 
a language in their own right.  I believe "Spanglish" (English+Spanish) is 
a common case.  It seems to me that to say one is speaking Spanglish in 
English is a not-unreasonable (if not-very-useful concept).  More 
precisely, speaking a subset of Spanglish corresponding to what an 
English-only speaker would understand.

My point is that, even with spoken natural languages, there are cases where 
one language is a subset of another;  i.e. an expression in language A can 
be understood as having the same meaning in B.

So would it be unreasonable to say (as a first approximation) that OWL is 
using RDF to express simple assertions, and OWL-specific constructs to 
represent restrictions on roles and classes?

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2002 06:30:53 UTC