Response to ISSUE-159

Hi David

This is an official RDF working group response to your comment, raised in your email CCd at the end of this email, which was tracked by the RDF WG as ISSUE-159. 

As you note, the bare term "interpretation" occured in several places in the Semantics document, without explanation. We have therefore added a short paragraph to section 4 (second paragraph) which briefly explains the technical meaning of the term, and added appropriate modifiers to many of the subsequent 'bare' uses to reduce possible ambiguity. The changes are visible in the latest Editor's draft.

The material to which you refer in the 2004 Semantics document is not a definition, but introductory prose at the start of section 1.3 which contains the definition of simple interpretation. The omission of such "tutorial" material from the 2013 Semantics document is deliberate, and part of a WG editorial decision that the primary purpose of the Semantics document should be to give a precise account of the semantics to readers who are familiar with the basic technical ideas of model-theoretic semantics, rather than serve as an introduction to the subject for the lay reader. This WG looks forward to the creation of one or more "Primer" documents written with the express aim of explaining RDF to users who are unfamiliar with the basic ideas. 

Please reply to public-rdf-comments@w3.org indicating whether this, and the changes made to the Semantics document, constitute an acceptable response to your comment.

Pat Hayes 
(for the W3C RDF Working Group)

-------------

On Oct 9, 2013, at 9:41 PM, David Booth 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.
> 
> Thanks,
> David
> 
> 

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Received on Tuesday, 15 October 2013 05:41:24 UTC