Re: what matters is what's said, not what's meant

At 8:47 PM -0400 10/9/03, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>>  1. If you derive a conclusion from a contradiction, then nobody is
>>  responsible for it but you: a derivation from a contradiction adds no
>>  weight to the conclusion at all, so if you publish it then that is
>>  just like publishing a brand-new assertion; you, the publisher, can't
>>  appeal to any other authority.
>...
>>  Im sure there are others, but the first one is enough to handle your
>>  case, since if I publish a contradiction, then its not going to be
>>  any SW-style use to anyone else: they can't use it to do anything
>>  that they couldn't do on their own.
>
>While I agree with that, it doesn't help with my original concern,
>which is how the use of a particular URI in an RDF graph affects how a
>receiver of that graph might behave.  If imagine you say to me (in the
>document "pat"):
>
>      pat:Donny a bio:Dingo.
>      pat:Donny a bio:Cat.
>
>I might well follow the bio link, and while I'll be nice and not hold
>you to everything bio says, ... what should I make of the fact that
>you've said Donny is an instance of two disjoint classes?  Hrm.
>Neither "pat" nor "bio" is inconsistent, but the combined set is
>(assuming OWL semantics and that bio really used OWL).
>
>It seems to me that as a reader I'm not going to be too happy with
>this graph you sent me.  What have I really learned from you about
>pat:Donny?  What can I do with what you said?  Not a lot, I think.
>Ewwww.
>
>So working back, I end up saying you SHOULD NOT say things like that,
>and MUST NOT do so knowingly.


Sandro - supposing I wish to send you a graph that points out that 
NOW believes life says at birth but that the Nat'l Right to Life 
group says life begins at conception --
  nrl:life :begins med:conception.
  now:life :begins med:birth.
  med:conception owl:disjoint med:birth.
would you say I MUST NOT send you such a document?
  I'm confused

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  *** 240-277-3388 (Cell)
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Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 22:57:44 UTC