RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

> From: Sandro Hawke
> Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 8:30 AM
> 
> From Peter F. Patel-Schneider:
> > In any case, there are indeed already more-or-less standard 
> ways of doing
> > much of what you appear to want.
> 
> I'm inclined to agree.
> 
> > 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?
> 
> I prefer to think the web page itself says things, and the owner bears
> *some* responsibility for the things said, but does not literally say
> them.
> 
> So perhaps "http://www.ibm.com" says some product is priced at $50.  I
> take that as a good indication that IBM Corp. will sell the product
> for $50, and I might say to a human that IBM says the price is $50,
> but if I were being very literal minded I'd rephrase it as "IBM's
> website says the price is $50."  That distinction is of course
> necessary in talking about the website being defaced.  "IBM's website
> was defaced!  Now it says the product costs $0.01!".  I couldn't
> express something like that if the registered owner was always taken
> as saying what the website said.
> 
> And I don't think it's a weakness to have little formal tie back to
> humans or owning corporations.  Most of what I imagine doing on the
> web (semantic or not) involves reasoning about what pages say, not
> about what the people behind the pages say.

This supports my point. If we get more responses, we may get even more 
answers. So for a particular statement, it could be the owner of the 
page, the owner of the web site with exceptions for fraud, or the page 
itself that is making statements. When it matters, how do I know which? 
Either there is a web page speaker (on Peter's view) or a web site 
speaker with exceptions (on Sandro's first view) or it is part of the 
global cloud of literal, true statements (on Sandro's second view).

I think it is ironic somehow that one of the most popular RDF 
vocabularies is Dublin Core, and one of the most common examples 
is dc:creator. There is a reason for this. It is considered nearly 
universally important to have a standard way for identifying the 
authors of web pages. Why not for RDF statements? Perhaps that 
could be our fourth (Dan's?) view, all RDF can include a self-
referential dc:creator tag. 

I don't agree that the comparison to ordinary web documents is 
completely accurate either. When you go from web publishing 
machine opaque natural language documents to publishing machine 
processible truth functional statements, you're doing something 
different. Things will happen based on the statements passing 
between machines without any human intervention. Also, I suspect 
it will end up less like a giant knowledge base and more like an 
ant colony, more based on communication than knowledge 
representation. I think there will be far more back and forth 
chattiness between machines than happens now on the web, and that 
this will usually require rapid identification of the speakers 
of statements.

John


> > > John Black
> > Peter F. Patel-Schneider

> -- sandro

Received on Friday, 11 June 2004 15:00:15 UTC