Re: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

I'm not quite sure why you are making these statements.  Yes, the Semantic
Web is currently quite literal, in that there is no way of stating
disbelief, denying something, etc., etc.  However, it is difficult to
devise a (single, uniform) representation language that gets all these
right, particularly if one wants to effectively reason in that language.

In any case, there are indeed already more-or-less standard ways of doing
much of what you appear to want.


From: "John Black" <JohnBlack@deltek.com>
Subject: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:17:54 -0400

> 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.

How about the ``owner'' of the web page, just like for web pages that are
HTML or XML documents?

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

Again, why not the usual situation in the rest of the web?  The contents of
Semantic Web web pages are asserted, just like other web pages.  Yes, no
Semantic Web language currently allows for denying, or quoting, or other
relationships between agents and propositions, but this may change.

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

Well determining (all of) an ``intended'' interpretation is generally not
possible.  All that a formal language can do is provide information that
can be used to narrow down the formal interpretation of a term.  There
already is a standard mechanism (owl:imports) that allows for the inclusion
of the meaning of one Semantic Web document (written in OWL) in another.
What more is needed at this point?

> 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.

This is not an easy problem to solve.  The current treatment of the
denotation of URI references at least has the desirable feature that it
does not rule out future solutions to this problem.

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

I'm of the opinion that removing information from a Semantic Web web page
``unsays'' it.

> 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?

Not to my mind.  I've been arguing very hard for a (particular) notion of
Semantic Web pragmatics that I think is very pragmatically motivated.

Sure, there are lots of things that one might like to be able to do in the
Semantic Web that are not currently possible.  I don't expect this to
change (at least for quite some time) - formal languages and programs are
currently not nearly as capable as human beings and there are other issues
to be considered (such as symbol grounding).

As well, the work on Named Graphs (currently available at
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/SWTSGuide/carroll-ISWC2004.pdf)
appears to me to fit right into what you want.  

> [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


Peter F. Patel-Schneider

Received on Friday, 11 June 2004 07:00:09 UTC