Re: getting the ball rolling (or at least providing a target to shoot at)

Adding a few comments. Ok, really one one comment at the moment :)

On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 01:36  PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider 
wrote:

[snip]
> Can one do better than this?  In particular, is there a way to provide
> information about what might be called the intended meaning of a URI
> reference?

Perhaps it shouldn't be so called. There are a family of things one 
might my mean by the intended meaning of a URI reference. (I can't 
believe I wrote that sentence. Oh well.) For example, even aside from 
speaker/sentence meaning issues of the particular *use* of a URI, there 
are speaker/sentence meaning issues for the ontology author. Not only 
might we have conflicts between the axioms and the rdfs:comments (or 
other documentation) but conflicts between different versions of the 
ontology (historical or parallel, e.g., one might introduce an 
unintended change in a new version, or one might not recognize the 
difference between the OWL full, DL, Lite and RDFS versions of an 
ontology; which one is the intended, canonical one, and does it 
actually matter?).

> OWL goes further than RDF here in two ways.  First, OWL is a more
> powerful formalism than RDF and thus when working in OWL there are
> more kinds of constraints that can be placed in documents.  Second,
> OWL has an imports statement that, in essence, allows multiple
> documents to be combined.  However, the meaning of a URI reference in
> OWL is still relative, as it depends on which OWL document or
> documents are under consideration.  So OWL does not provide a way of
> getting at *the* intended meaning of a URI reference.
[snip]

One thing this discussion avoids is what I think Lynn Stein meant by 
"effective" meaning, i.e., to drop more names, what Sellars called the 
language entries and exits. How does the meaning of terms affect 
software (and human) behavior?

Another avoided is whether URIs already have some intrinsic semantics, 
e.g., mailtos refer to mail addresses, http uris refer to, say, 
documents.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Saturday, 20 September 2003 15:41:58 UTC