Re: [ALL] agenda telecon 14 Dec

* On Dec 16, 2011, at 01:42 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
** On Dec 14, 2011, at 5:44 PM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
>> My position is: why change what works?
> 
> Because it does not work. It is ambiguous, and different people build things which work differently as a result. And in any case, I don't want to change it, I want to get it clear. I am even willing to go along with the poisonous 'punning' idea, but I want it to be made as clear and as exact as the rest of the spec is, and this is done by putting it into the semantics (and into Concepts) explicitly.



Pat pretty much voices my basic position:

   I don't want to change [what people denote with IRIs], 
   I want to get [what they may be denoting] clear.

Punning happens.  

Ambiguity exists in the ways people use names to denote 
real-world-things and statements about those things.  

Ambiguity exists in the ways people use URIs to denote 
real-world-things and the graphs-about-those-things.

This ambiguity is part of what has made the existing LOD Cloud 
exist at all -- because people used the *intent* that worked for 
them at the time, RDF2004/SPARQL2008 be damned.

This ambiguity is also part of what has made the existing 
not-really-Semantic Web not-quite-what-it-could-be -- because 
one cannot depend on the intent others had when assertions 
were made being the same as the intent one has when reasoning 
over those assertions.

We know people mix their intents.  

Even a person who tries to observe RFC/W3C/ISO/etc. standards 
in all things, may use behave non-standardly at times.  

It's human nature.

And that should be made OK, and more to the point, made to not 
*break* the Linked Data Web.

How do we make it OK?

By saying "RDF 2004 said xyz was the One True Way, but it turns
out there are at least Two True Ways.  These are them: ...  
(There *may* be more, which are not yet known or codified!)  
You may encounter assertions which are based on either or both, 
and you cannot presume that either is absolute.  But now you 
know what the (known) possibilities are, so your rules and 
reasoners can be made to address and allow for the ambiguities."

Or so I believe.

Be seeing you,

Ted



--
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| Q: Are you sure?
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