No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

So here is what it looks like to me.

A general purpose communication system, where:

There is no standard way to tell who is making statements.

There is no standard way to tell whether whoever is doing it is 
asserting, denying, quoting, or just experimenting with those 
statements.

Its a new, artificial language but there is no standard way for 
fixing or learning the intended interpretation of its terms, URIrefs.

URIrefs, most of which look just like URLs, are to be treated as 
strings bearing no standard relation to the URLs they look 
like, or to anything that might be done with them on the web.

You can reason over it, but everything stated is considered true, 
and there is no standard way for anything to be unsaid. 

And the people that would need to be involved to develop some 
plain old-fashioned standard language pragmatics[1,2] are either 
firmly against it or are too busy out writing code with it to 
bother.

Do I understand this correctly?


[1] The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction 
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/semprag.html
[2] Pragmatics of the Semantic Web
http://semanticweb2002.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/proceedings/Position/kim.pdf


John Black

Received on Thursday, 10 June 2004 18:17:55 UTC