Re: How does RDF/OWL formalism relate to meanings?

On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 20:53, Pat Hayes wrote:
[...]
> But the direct answer to your question is that we don't really have a 
> way to do that, actually, yet. Not a fixed, standard way. And IMO, 
> until the TAG group gets its communal head out of the sand, or 
> whereever it has it located,  we never will, because the TAG group 
> thinks that URIs are already anchored to "resources" which they 
> uniquely "identify",

I don't understand why you find this notion novel, let alone
disagreeable. Names denote things. It's a recurring pattern
in languages. For example, in SCL:


A nonempty set UI called the universe;
A mapping intI from VO to UI;

-- http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/SCL_current_2004_rf.html


The webarch document is written in much less formal terms,
but it's the same idea. The webarch document suggests
an idealization where there's just one interpretation,
but that's just an idealization. If you like, look
at a webarch:resource as a mapping from an SCL
interpretation I to an element of U[I]. Or look
at each protocol message as carrying its own interpretation
or something. It doesn't matter that much. The webarch
document doesn't constrain things that formally; it
uses more utilitarian/economic descriptions such as...


"a resource should be assigned a URI if a third party might reasonably
want to link to it, make or refute assertions about it, retrieve or
cache a representation of it, include all or part of it by reference
into another representation, annotate it, or perform other operations on
it".
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/


>  and so refuses to think about the fact that they 
> aren't, and what to do about it.

Oh bull-pucky. There are megabytes of evidence to the
contrary. The TAG thinks about it a lot, and TAG
members have thought about it and written about it
for at least 10 years, and I'm not aware of any
indication that it will stop.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
see you at the WWW2004 in NY 17-22 May?

Received on Wednesday, 7 April 2004 15:34:56 UTC