Re: RDF Semantics - Definition of "Interpretation" is missing

On 10 Oct 2013, at 04:41, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> Regarding
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-rdf11-mt-20130723/
> 
> Section 4 of the RDF Semantics is careful to define all of the major terms that are used within the document . . . except one.  AFAICT, the general notion of an "interpretation" is nowhere defined.  Later in the document, specific kinds of interpretations are defined, such as Simple Interpretations, RDF Interpretations and RDFS Interpretations.  But AFAICT a definition of the general notion of an interpretation is completely absent.
> 
> The 2004 version of the semantics had a very nice explanation of the notion of interpretations:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/#interp
> and it had a glossary definition of the term:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-mt-20040210/#glossInterpretation
> 
> I don't know why the current draft eliminated those sections, but somehow the RDF Semantics needs to explain what is meant by an "interpretation", since the notion is central to the semantics.
> 
> I would suggest restoring the explanation from the 2004 version, but I would be fine with some other replacement instead.

+1 I really like the 2004 definition of interpretation. I'd like to point out that there are courses on Coursera
now that do a very good job of explaining the origin of that notion of interpretation. See the course on 
Mathematical Philosophy:


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> Thanks,
> David
> 

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