- From: Gerd Wagner <wagnerg@tu-cottbus.de>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 21:46:40 +0200
- To: "'Dave Reynolds'" <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: <public-rule-workshop-discuss@w3.org>
> I think the point is that RDFS and OWL are designed to be > monotonic Monotonicity should not be a primary W3C design goal. It's a nice property for nice and clean mathematical theories, since mathematics deals with eternal truths and with cumulative knowledge. But in Web information management practices we do not deal with nice and clean axiomatic theories. Rather, we have to deal with all kinds of information items, most of them being subject to change (there are not many eternal truths, neither in factual knowledge, nor in vocabulary knowledge), and many of them being contradictory. So, we should better not expect too much monotonicity on the Web. > NAF violates this, hence its use in the semantic web being > ... a cause for debate. I know. But I find the effort of some to ban NAF from W3C languages a useless attempt of exorcism, which is doomed to fail. And again: the important point about a Web-oriented use of NAF is not really "scope" (in the sense of provenance) but its relationship to definitive knowledge (as captured by N3's "definitiveDocument" construct). -Gerd -------------------------------------------- http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~gwagner Email: G.Wagner@tu-cottbus.de Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany
Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2005 19:58:25 UTC