RE: Comment on "Meaning and the Semantic Web"

> From: Graham Klyne
> Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2004 5:16 AM
> To: John Black; Bijan Parsia
> 
> At 23:14 01/06/04 -0400, John Black wrote:
> >Let's use a little stage setting here.  Suppose I have a 
> search engine
> >agent that populates my web site with results of a semantic 
> web enabled
> >search.  I am in particular looking for FOAF documents with 
> a particular
> >content.  Now everything is working fine until one day, 
> documents that
> >used to be retrieved correctly stop showing up and others 
> that I've never
> >seen before - and don't want - do start showing up. Now I have to
> >debug this. Two equally plausible hypotheses occur to me. Either Dan
> >has gone bad, and decided to mess with the FOAF schema, or my search
> >agent has failed and its mistakes are equivalent to what Dan might
> >have done.  I can't tell which.  My documents, using the output
> >of the search engine, are defective in the same way in either case.
> >This is the symmetry argument.  In a society of communicators,
> >correct interpretation is just as important as correct publishing.
> 
> When this is truly a concern, maybe this proposal from Larry 
> Masinter may 
> be of some help:
> 
>    http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-masinter-dated-uri-04.txt
> 
> (i.e. you have a means to indicate a reference to a resource 
> as it was 
> presented at a specified time.)
> 

Yes.  I agree that something like this could take care of the 
inadvertent misuse of an updated schema document.  

But my real point is the symmetry between correct publishing behavior 
and correct interpreting behavior.

So lets change the scene a little:
Lets say that as I begin my debugging, I discover that Dan, true to 
his word, has not changed the FOAF schema.  So I start investigating 
my search agent.  It turns out that the company has hired Bijan and 
Peter and they have altered the search engine as follows: They have 
noticed that there are some ontologies which are offensive, homophobic, 
racist, fascist, and so on.  They want to register their dissent 
with the worldviews presented by these web sites.  Furthermore, 
knowing that you can't expect the semantic web to educate fools, 
they take it upon themselves to add in their opposing views to 
each search result they return.  When confronted, they argue, in 
their defense, that there should be no restrictions on their 
interpretation of content, that they should not be required to 
believe such offense speech, that they have a right to disagree 
with such views, that it must remain easy for them to do so, and 
so on, else the world will sink into totalitarianism. For my part, 
lets say I work for a watch-dog organization and am researching 
the causes of hate crimes.  I need to know what these sites are 
publishing in order to help combat it.  I need accurate reports of 
precisely these offensive ideas delivered with as great a fidelity 
to their intended, offensive meaning as possible.

The point is that there are use cases where it would be critical 
that an interpreting agent be required to discover and report 
the actual meaning of a set of published documents.  And this 
might be aided by giving URI authors facilities to specify what 
that meaning is.

John


> #g
> 
> 
> ------------
> Graham Klyne
> For email:
> http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2004 09:13:24 UTC