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

Dan,

Before we continue, would you mind taking a 
stab at answering the same questions that Pat answered from the 
point of view of the TAG and the Web architeture?  Or at least 
the specific question that Pat answered: If I want to make 
assertions about my specific company and its employees, and 
have my assertions understood to refer to them and none other, 
how do I go about that? 

John Black

> From: Dan Connolly [mailto:connolly@w3.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 3:35 PM
> To: Pat Hayes
> Cc: John Black; public-sw-meaning@w3c.org
> Subject: 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 16:25:32 UTC