Re: When does a document acquire (web) semantics?

Can we perform a mashup on the two positions?

Someone who created a SPARQL end point has, by some means, created an
interpretation (graph) to query based on some document.  Perhaps other
SPARQL end points would have different interpretations?

Just a tenth EURO...
Jack

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:30 AM, John Madden <john.madden@duke.edu> wrote:
> We had an interesting call in TERM today. One of the topics I would like to boil down to the question "When does a document acquire its semantics?" or, "when does a document come to mean something?"
>
> I argued the (admittedly intentionally) radical view that documents have no semantics whatsoever until a reader performs an act of interpretation upon the document, which in the Semantic Web world would be the same as attributing an RDF/OWL graph to the document.
>
> Even if the author of the document attributes a a particular RDF/OWL graph to her won document, I argued that this graph is not privileged in any way. That others could justifiably argue that the author's own RDF/OWL graph is incomplete, or flawed, or irrelevant, or even incorrect. And the same is true of any subsequent interpreters (i.e. authors of RDF/OWL graphs that purport to represent the "meaning" of the same document).
>
> Eric argued a really interesting point. He argued (and Eric, correct me if I'm interpreting you wrong here), that semantics instead come into existence (or perhaps *can* come into existence) at the point when somebody executes a SPARQL query on a set of RDF/OWL graphs. That is to say, maybe I'm wrong and semantics doesn't even come into existence when somebody attributes an RDF/XML graph to a document; but rather it only comes into existence when somebody queries across (possibly) many graphs of many different people.
>
> What do you think?
>
> John
>

Received on Monday, 1 February 2010 18:53:26 UTC