- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 09:24:15 -0400
- To: public-sw-meaning@w3.org
IRC logs of a predicussion IRC chat twixt Tim, me, and some other folks on #rdfig. http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2003-10-08.html#T20-38-33 **THINGS PERHAPS APPROACHING CONSENSUS 1) Strong "Ontological Commitment" is not required. To wit, there's no MUST, or even SHOULD that your document is consistent if and only if the imports closure over URI *used* in your document (+ your document) is consistent. There's a meaning-rathole version of this, or meaning-rathole consequences, but I'm avoiding them at the moment. 2) It may be interesting for programs to do (or respect the effect of) various sorts of imports closure. I'd be willing to upgrade that away from the "may" except that I think this is subsumed by, "it may be interesting for programs to do information gathering and to make choices about how they interpret third party assertions and how they incorporate them into their kb and how they act on them." I regard this as a truism, but that might be controversial. Hmm. That's it. I guess. Any other candidates? Maybe: 3) *owl:imports* has some infelicities. Perhaps better was around: http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2003-10-08.html#T20-56-54 4) Consistency of a RDF (or OWL) document consists in it being possible that all the statements asserted in that document can be co-true (to phrase it colloquially; for a crisp definition, see the specs or a logic text). This may seem trivial, but it's actually a fairly specific notion of consistency (glorious though it may be), and it wasn't always clear that everyone meant this. In the IRC Chat, Tim and I managed to *not* have me dyed with the specter of having defined a special kind of consistency for OWL and getting us down the road of a whole family of "consistencies". There may be an infelicity in owl:imports being in *OWL* rather than in *RDF* (i.e., that an RDF Parser shouldn't respect owl:imports). It *may* be worth making some sort of comment about that. **THINGS NO WHERE NEAR CONSENSUS 5) The "priority of the predicate" to meaning. 6) The "meaningless" (or, at least, inutility) of RDF documents given the current specs. Do the RDF spec fail in their "duty", as Tim puts it? 7) That the current specs either suggest or partially entail 1, but not enough to avoid 2. 8) What kind, if any, infelicity a document having an inconsistent imports closure has. (And whether there needs to be spec language about this.) 9) The denotation, referent, meaning, or singularity of these of URIs. 10) What URI ownership *really* gets you. 11) The worthwhileness of pursuing specification of "naive protocols" for...something. Import closure or "coherence". Note: I'm a bit bummed by the "protocol" talk. I don't consider it to be an advance. There seems to be a bunch of baggage associated with the use in this discussion. In fact, a sorta rhetorical trick to try to level the playing field for the "protocol engineers". It was strongly introduced by Tim's reply to my issue framing (see my comment on this: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sw-meaning/2003Oct/ 0005.html). So, it may be my personal baggage, but it still feels akin to the "WE MUST SPECIFY! YOU DON'T GET SPECS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THEM!!!!" line. Let me state here that there is no need for and some disutility in this line. Certainly neither Peter, nor Pat, nor myself fail to appreciate specifications and what they can do. We disagree about so proposed *content* (and perhaps, some derivations of what should be or is in some specs' content). Note2: This item is not *just* about people who think we don't need any of these "protocols" in a spec vs. those who do, but about those who think we should jump straight to "robust protocols". 12) Weak "ontological commitment". You shouldn't use a URI in a way that conflicts with its owner approved definition. I'm not sure exactly how to distinguish this from 1, or 11, or 10. But the intuition for distinguishing it from 1 (and making it a kind of 11) is that with 1, you're dealing with the *WHOLE* kb at the other end of the imports. So any inconsistency anywhere infects your document. Here, there's something like the idea that you shouldn't conflict *only* in how you use that URI. Or something. **THING TIM, DANC, AND I MAY HAVE CONSENSUS ON BUT IT'S UNCLEAR FROM THE IRC LOGS http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2003-10-08.html#T21-48-11 Roughly, the modified null-hypothesis: We ask the TAG to close the issue and continue with the sw-meaning list (or a sucessor list) **A META POINT If we do have some consensus on one, it will be worth reporting back in some semi-official way to various groups. E.g., as a lc comment (a happy one!) to rdf core.
Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 09:24:22 UTC