Re: Our approach to unasserted assertions is ambiguous and lossy [ was: Re: streamlining the baseline]

On 7/5/24 07:32, Thomas Lörtsch wrote:
> 
> 
[...]
> 
> The issue is that this robs us of the ability to qualify a specific relation in the graph. E.g. we may say that Alice doesn’t endorse said statement, but Bob does. But can we say something about how we, as the author of te graph, see it? Do we have to resort to ourselves in third person, like:
> 
>      :a :b :c .
>      << :a :b :c >> a :Theory ,
>                     :accordingTo :ThisAuthor .

Well of course.    An RDF graph doesn't have ownership or anything like it. 
It is just a graph - a mathematical object.

One could set up predicates whose intended meaning showed authorship.  But, 
absent some special-purpose addition to the semantics of RDF, these would just 
be predicates, with no special place in RDF.  And there is then the problem of 
being able to refer to the graph itself.

So the net result is that there is no special place for graph authorship in an 
RDF graph.   One could get closer to this in an RDF dataset.  But what do you 
get from authorship?   It's not as if authorship has any special semantics in 
RDF.  If one wants to do some sort of extra-RDF processing of provenance or 
related information that is ... extra to RDF and you can then do whatever you 
want.  But don't expect anyone else to do similar processing and obtain 
results that are anything like the results that you obtain.

> I want this metaphysical gap betwen the assertion and the annotation to go away. It only adds ambiguity, useless doubt and ample opportunity for nitpicking dissent.

Well, in a certain strong sense, RDF is (after the results of the discussion 
on social meaning) all about dissent.   I have the RDF graphs that I use - you 
have the ones that you use.   They don't have to be the same, even if we both 
make the claim that the information in our graph corresponds somehow to a 
global notion of reality.  In fact they can be completely different.

> Instead I want an n-ary relation, e.g. like this (could of course also be a singleton property, because annotating the property has more natural semantics):
> 
>      :a :b [ rdfq:ObjectInQualifiedAssertion :c ;
>              a :Theory ;
>              :accordingTo :ThisAuthor ]
> 
>      rdfq:ObjectInQualifiedAssertion rdfs:domain rdfq:QualifiedAssertion .
> 
> This provides a solid link between assertion and annotation. The only thing that needs to be defined is what it means for a value to be qualified, i.e. to be the _main_ value, not the annotation to it. That is not without problem, or otherwise I would already provide a nicer wording instead of "ObjectInQualifiedAssertion", but it is doable. Even power hungry princes have been able to come up with something catchy - "primus inter pares" - so the concept seems intuitive enough to even withstand war and terror.

So go ahead.  Nobody is stopping you.  But don't expect everyone else to agree 
that this should be built into RDF, even if they understand what you are 
getting at.

[...]

peter

Received on Friday, 5 July 2024 12:19:22 UTC