Re: some notes

Le Vendredi, 26 sept 2003, à 21:25 America/Montreal, pat hayes a écrit :
> Not at all: think of the contextual knowledge in that very example. 
> Asprin is a drug; people don't eat dogs, drugs are used for medical

not true. People eat dogs.

> purposes and usually must be ingested in order to work, .... (For all 
> I know, there may have been times and places where dogs, or parts of 
> dogs, may have been used as pharmaceuticals.) Even the simplest act of 
> linguistic comprehension is based on so much context that no attempt 
> to write it out formally has ever succeeded.

agreed. Imagine for this discussion going on since the start on this 
mailing-list. How many english speakers with different background. A 
few none english speakers like me.

> While I certainly do't claim that if we had enough "URI dictionaries" 
> we could avoid all misuse, abuse, and disagreement, I can't help but 
> think that it would be beneficial to have registries play an authority 
> role (perhaps more descriptive than prescriptive).

people will develop their registry depending on the community I think 
and we will not have One semantic Web, but a lof of mini semantic webs, 
that will have sometimes great deal to communicate effectively even 
based on the same protocol.

> I think it is VERY different. For a start, the dictionary definitions 
> don't fix the meanings of words: they simply indicate them in a 
> concise way.

I would rather say that the dictionary definition is the choice of an 
editor on one or more interpretations of the word at point in the 
society. It's why words are entering or going out of the dictionary or 
sometimes change meanings.

Recently sometimes has referenced the definition of woman in french 
dictionaries at different years (on a scale of 150 years). The results 
are very interesting.

> But why would this group of engineers use a URI to converse? I don't 
> know anyone *that* geeky. Even engineers do usually talk using at 
> least a 

You haven't worked at W3C :p Ask to DanC ;)

> But in any case, the analogy with NL suggests that any attempt to 
> control or even influence this by external fiat or authority isn't 
> likely to succeed, if this kind of thing is indeed anything at all 
> like language. If you want some real-world experience in trying to 
> attach meanings to words by writing authoritative registries, just ask 
> the Academie Francaise about things like "rosbif" and "bigmac".

Very good point and without saying that they are still on an ongoing 
production and that words, for example, starting by T are still not 
defined. Pathetic sometimes, but poetic as well.

--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
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