- From: Peter Ansell <ansell.peter@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 09:40:48 +1000
- To: Andrea Splendiani <andrea.splendiani@bbsrc.ac.uk>
- Cc: John Madden <john.madden@duke.edu>, w3c semweb HCLS <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>, "Eric Prud'hommeaux" <eric@w3.org>
I agree completely! Cheers, Peter On 2 February 2010 09:26, Andrea Splendiani <andrea.splendiani@bbsrc.ac.uk> wrote: > Hi, > > I think there are two aspects related to semantics. > One is interpretation (like: the world is flat by Mark). And this is in the ontology or, if you want, even in queries. > But there is also the fact that you "name" things when you expose a resource. The resource itself, or some info in more detail. > This naming is based on some common grounding without which you cannot apply ontologies or queries. > > my 0.1 cents > > ciao, > Andrea > > On 1 Feb 2010, at 18:30, John Madden 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 > > --- > Andrea Splendiani > Senior Bioinformatics Scientist > Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, UK > andrea.splendiani@bbsrc.ac.uk > +44(0)1582 763133 ext 2004 > > >
Received on Monday, 1 February 2010 23:41:22 UTC