Fwd: Freedom lovin' formalists

I even sent it to the wrong list, first. But I *really* love that 
Subject :)

Begin forwarded message:

> All in response to sandro:
>
> Pat Hayes:
>
> "Oh, but if we follow that elegant device Tim has implemented, then 
> you should, because I will have imported stuff from bio. If I didnt 
> import it, then Im not publishing a contradiction: Im just disagreeing 
> with people. (You could still come to a poor opinion about my 
> reliability, of course, just on that basis.)"
>
> "Why not just say in this case: what I said has been reduced to 
> nothing, rendered free of content, by B's change, not that I am now in 
> violation in some way. If I care about what I publish, this gives me 
> plenty of motivation to fix it, but fueled by the normal social 
> conventions of information publication on the Web, rather than by a 
> TAG 'rule'"
>
> Peter Patel-Schneider:
>
> "Why SHOULD I NOT (and MUST NOT knowingly) create an OWL document that 
> when
> combined with the OWL documents available at some location that can be
> determined from doing some text processing of the names in my document
> would produce an inconsistency?  There are lots of good reasons for me
> wanting to do this.  I might disagree with the information in these 
> other
> documents but still want to make statements about the names in the
> documents, for example.  Saying that this is a bad thing to do (SHOULD 
> NOT)
> or even an incorrect thing (MUST NOT knowingly) is just stifling 
> legitimate
> dissent."
>
> Me:
>
> Well, it's vanity to quote myself. :)
>
> How are we to disagree about what bio:Cats are if we can't use the 
> term 'bio:Cats'? How am I to *disagree* about bio:Cats if I can't 
> actually use the term? I have to have *some* term in common or we're 
> just talking past each other.
>
> We, perhaps, could do something nasty with extensive metalinguistic 
> apparatus. We don't have that. Quoting alone is not enough. We 
> shoudn't *need* that.
>
> No proponent of the URI Owner's League of Definitional Dominance has 
> yet explained to me, to my satisfaction, why examples like Sandros are 
> *so* different from my saying that w3c:SandroHawke rdf:type 
> w3c:Director. Am I wrong in my use of the subject or the object? (I'm 
> assuming some ontolgies here in which Sandro of type some class 
> disjointWith Director). Or better, :Sandro :firstName "Bob". Indeed, 
> what if *sandro's* site claimed that sandro:Bijan sandro:firstName 
> "bob". Add, sandro:Bijan foaf:mbox mailto:bparsia@isr.umd.edu. I've 
> now got a possible uri merge (given the foaf ontology) leading to 
> contradiction (assuming my ontology has my correct first name) but 
> only if Sandro does the merge.
>
> Hmm. I'm tiring out. And there was *sorta* a way to disagree  without 
> *quite* using bijan:Bijan. Why should that be exempt from the 
> protection that URI owners have?
>
> (Pat did, early on, claim that there was something distinctive about 
> "names of concepts", but I still disagree. I don't *think* that class 
> names are merely Russelian (i.e., mere abbreviations for 
> descriptions/class expressions).
>
> Cheers,
> Bijan Parsia.
>
> P.S. I don't 100% stand by the babble in this message, but I thought 
> the title so cute I had to go with it :)
>

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 22:11:33 UTC