Re: Good grammar and proper footnotes for data

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 6:01 PM, stu <stuart.weibel@gmail.com> wrote:

> An historical note of almost no interest, but relevant to your statement:
> " it is likely that RDF, if re-invented, would end up strongly resembling
> what we currently have."  One of the early suggestions about the metadata
> encoding approach that became RDF was that it would be implemented in either
> Lisp or Prolog (I can't recall which, and its not so important, as both of
> them have roots in the syllogistic deduction that characterizes RDF.  Thank
> heaven THAT didn't happen ;-) !

You might be thinking of
http://archive.ifla.org/documents/libraries/cataloging/metadata/dublin3.htm
"On Information Factoring in Dublin Metadata Records", C. M.
Sperberg-McQueen, 17 April 1996.
also at http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/03/19/info-factoring/

"This document describes some problems in the interpretation of
metadata records which contain repeated fields, repeated field groups,
or references to other metadata records. The semantics of repeated
fields and groups (and, equivalently, of references to other metadata
records) are described using sentential logic, and a proposal is made
to specify the interpretation of repeating groups using the
disjunctive normal form of corresponding logical expressions."

Or for the Lisp-y tradition, the RDF ancestor
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-pics-ng-metadata "This document introduces
an model for representing metadata, and a syntax for expressing and
transporting metadata based on this model." (nearby:
http://www.w3.org/PICS/NG/ cites both...)

My colleagues at vu.nl btw make a lot of use of Prolog with RDF, eg.
nice work at http://www.swi-prolog.org/web/ClioPatria/whitepaper.html
but in general, I'm quite happy that RDF allows folk to make use of
tools from the KR tradition, but doesn't require it...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 18:10:00 UTC