RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

> From: Jim Hendler
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 6:25 PM
> 
> At 18:17 -0400 6/10/04, John Black wrote:
> >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] 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


> Yup, I think you got it -- just like the real world!


Some of these are difficult in the real world also. But in the 
real world we have the benefit of the full power of natural 
language, centuries of vocabulary development, human perception, 
problem solving, and general intelligence, with brains that have 
evolved language capabilities over many millenniums. Still we have 
trouble.

But this is a new, artificial language that will be processed 
by machines without perception, natural language, or general 
intelligence. Things that we, as individuals take for granted 
in the real world, like 30 years of language vocabulary learning 
and conversational policy development are just missing. Its not 
like the real world. It is utterly language impoverished and 
we must manually supply everything it will do.

John Black


>-- 
> Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
> Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
> Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
> Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Thursday, 10 June 2004 21:27:11 UTC