RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

A
>As a side note, I have a personal suspicion about the genesis of
>one of the ideas behind RDF. The sole evidence for it is that it
>explains (to me, at least) one of the more surprising notions that
>has been advanced about RDF, that the predicate carries the meaning.
>I suspect that after the web was created the creators looked at it
>and thought that it was good. An amazing amount of things can be
>done with just the simple relation of 'isRelatedTo'. Then they said,
>"But can't we do better than just to say this resource 'isLinkedTo'
>that resource? Couldn't we make the relation 'isLinkedTo' (or
>'isRelatedTo') carry more meaning. We should be able to say,
>'isLinkedToAsCreatorOf' or 'isLinkedToAsTheDateOf'. And instead
>of creating the link by embedding one URI in a document identified
>by another URI, lets give that more meaningful
>'isLinkedToAsCreateorOf' a URI name so that the meaning of the
>relation expressed can actually be looked up on the web as well."
>Sorry for the digression and for the error if I am mistaken.


I'm not sure why you say it this way -- one of the key features of 
RDF is that you can have a labeled rather than an unlabeled graph, 
and we RDFers say that lots of times.  From the earliest days of the 
web people argued that a set of labels would be useful - there was a 
proposal (I think in an early MCF draft) to have about 10 particular 
labels, and about the same time some of us started arguing for the 
use of URIs giving us an infinite set of labels -- RDF realized this 
was right, and it is a key part of the design.  Thus, one way to look 
at a basic RDF triple is simply "This URI is linked to that URI by 
the relation in this third URI" -- and thus any individual or group 
can create a relationship URI and use it -- and if they use it 
consistently, the link can be useful.

However, another key idea grew about the same time -- as long as we 
are using URIs, we could make those URIs dereferencable -- that is, 
we could look and see if there is a document there, and if so, 
perhaps that document could describe the link -- RDFS and OWL provide 
vocabularies that live at those links and provide information about 
the "intent" of those relationships.

And technically, that is the heart of the Semantic Web architecture - 
links that can be named and described more formally.

IMO, the social meaning issue arises from the fact that we have both 
referencing and dereferecing going on.  When links share a URI, and 
there's no document at that URI to dereference, then it is clear that 
any meaning of that term is in some sort of off-line "Social" 
conventions between the users thereof.  However, when we add the 
dereferencing it becomes trickier -- because now we have to ask if 
use of the term in some way "commits" to what is in the dereferencing 
document, if the owner of that document controls the use of the term, 
etc.

There's lots of other "social meaning" issues on the Semantic Web, 
and the threads on this list talk about many of them, but in my mind 
the key ones are those that arise from the issue of the relation 
between the named terms and the documents that describe, in some 
formal way, the use of those terms


>
>And the absence of "...easy access to disagreements...", the
>ability to disagree with, deny, or refute propositions, as has been
>convincingly argued on this list, is of profound importance.
>
>[snip]
>
>>  >(http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/SWTSGuide/carroll-ISWC2004.pdf)
>>  > appears to me to fit right into what you want.
>
>I agree. The development of assertion described in this paper would
>be a great place to start.
>
>John Black
>
>>  > > John Black
>>  > Peter F. Patel-Schneider
>
>>  -- sandro

-- 
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 Sunday, 13 June 2004 14:00:58 UTC