RE: Comment on "Meaning and the Semantic Web"

> From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider
> Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 3:01 PM
> 
> From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
> Subject: Re: Comment on "Meaning and the Semantic Web"
> Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 10:32:36 -0500
> 
> [...]
> 
> If every term (not just common 
> words, but
> also proper names, noun phrases, etc.) I use commits me to information
> created by the coiner of that term, then I would be happier 
> under a vow of
> silence.
> 
> Note, however, that this only holds for me if the commitment 
> comes from
> *every* *term* and from a place determined by the form of the 
> term.
>
> [...]
> 
> > And this is good, presumably, on 
> > this view, because any kind of presumed relationship between 
> > ontologies would render everyone's meanings hostage to others' 
> > misinterpretations: a danger - if you wish to think of it 
> as a danger 
> > - to which of course ANY form of communication is prone; so if 
> > avoiding this danger is your primary motivating concern, then it 
> > seems to follow that you are advocating that communication 
> of content 
> > is not the primary aim or goal of the Semantic Web. 
> 
> Well, yes, this is a danger.  I believe that it is not a 
> negligible danger
> - for some terms - and thus that a communication scheme must 
> have ways to
> opt out of information provided by the coiner of a term.  I 
> believe that
> human communication works this way - usually we go along with 
> the standard
> information package related to meaning of a term, e.g., the 
> president of the
> United States, but sometimes, and sometimes even for good 
> reasons, we opt
> out of this standard package, perhaps to argue that the true 
> president of
> the United States is not the person annointed by the Supreme 
> Court but is
> instead the person who should have received the most 
> electoral votes under
> the rules in place at the time the election was held.
>
> [...]
>
> Well, to summarize, I view the opt-out aspects of our 
> proposal to be there
> for the hopefully rare cases where they are needed and that 
> communities, in
> particular application communities, will in fact end up 
> always using the
> coiner-provided meaning of the terms related to their interests.  
> 
> [...]

You say there are still these hopefully rare cases where opt-out 
of information provided by the coiner of a term is needed.

But consider the following scenario:

Suppose a good civil libertarian decides to set up a semantically 
enabled web site advising voters how to vote. He implements an 
agent which scans the RDF/OWL of congressmen and women looking for 
those who use 'softening-up' to mean 'righteous cruelty when 
carried out in the name of the war on terrorism', or other 
offensive definitions of certain controversial terms. When this 
agent finds such a use, it generates an RDF/OWL document that cites 
this use, states its oposition to the term, and then recommends to 
the constituents of the site that they vote against that politician. 
These RDF/OWL documents are then converted to HTML and used by 
citizens on their way to the polls.

This example has all the ingredients of such a case. The term in 
question is one of those disputed terms rather than a question of 
fact based on a shared vocabulary. It is highly politicized with 
angry participants on all sides of the debate. The purpose and 
design of the agent in question is to register dissent with the 
term and with the policies that would result from its use.

And yet, I assert, such an agent could not function if it opted-out 
of the politicians offensive definitions of those controversial 
terms. In fact, the more information provided by the coiner of 
the term this agent can access and rely on for its determination 
of its dissent, the more valid and useful it will be.

John

> 
> > Pat
> 
> Peter F. Patel-Schneider
> Bell Labs Research
> 
>

Received on Monday, 7 June 2004 19:45:29 UTC