Re: An intuition pump

snip

>>  >I am not against the deliberate self-imposition of a fixed common meaning
>>  >for vocabulary terms.  Even though this is not common in human discourse,
>>  >there are many cases where a fixed common meaning is useful, in particular
>>  >when systems with very limited reasoning power are employed.  However, I am
>>  >against the simple use of a vocabulary term committing one to a fixed
>>  >common meaning, and much in favour of an explicit mechanism (e.g., imports)
>>  >for this commitment.
>>
>>  this is what I cannot really understand -- it's where I'm really
>>  looking for a use case that shows a difference --If you and I both
>>  refer (in different places) to http://.../user/pfps#PerfectBeing we
>>  don't need to import the page to see if we are referring to the same
>>  thing.
>
>I think that we very much do need to determine what information we believe
>about http://.../user/pfps#PerfectBeing before we can determine whether we
>are using it to refer to compatible notions.

my point exactly - but you miss the importance of the reference in my 
brain dead approach -- look, two scientists can know if they are 
pointing to the same box before they look inside - however, if they 
want to be sure they have the same cat in the box, they need to open 
it - otherwise one may think the cat is dead, the other may think it 
alive (or not a cat at all).   The point I make is that "which box" 
and "what's inside" are different issues - and the first is easy on 
the web, which makes the second possible.

>
>When are two systems in the Semantic Web referring to exactly the same box?
>I see very, very few chances for this to happen.

whereas I see this all the time - our OWL page uses lots of links to 
other people's boxes, and then displays what is there when 
appropriate -- so we have a link to the W3C RSS feed without knowing 
what messages will appear on our home page when that link is 
exercised (via a RDF Query)

>
>>  So, in a sense, I interpret Tim's approach as "The owner of the URI
>>  gets to define what HE/SHE/IT means by that URI"   anyone else is
>>  welcome to say things about the owner, the predicate, the URI, etc -
>>  but they cannot change the "meaning" of that specific URI unless they
>>  do it in their space - in which case it is their claim about the
>>  meaning, not the owner's (and their URI is where they state what they
>>  claim the meaning is).
>
>I really don't understand what you could mean by ``meaning'' here.  I don't
>see that it can be ``denotation'' or ``defining information'' or anything
>else that I can relate to.
>

well, my point on this one is simple too - I don't understand those 
either, so let's not use those words -- I still am looking for a test 
case where I don't need to dereference peter:meaning to see what 
breaks.

>>  Note also that a URI with nothing there (i.e. no dereferencerable
>>  document or a non-document URI) works in the above anyway - the owner
>>  makes no claim as to the meaning of the URI, but other systems
>>  grounding at that URI can at least agree they are refering to the
>>  same "box" despite it's null content
>
>Well, I would like to be able to have the Semantic Web concern itself with
>something besides boxes.  Perhaps all that you mean here is a common
>vocabulary.

I mean building common vocabulary more easily because "symbol 
grounding" is an essentially solved problem - the main difference 
between KR on the Web and KR in the real world IMHO


-- 
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)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler      *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER ***

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 13:10:40 UTC