RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

Pat and friends --

It's good to see this complex problem being discussed.

At 01:57 PM 6/14/04 -0500, Pat wrote:
>...there is a gap here precisely because the SW notations only express 
>CONTENT, they do not express INTENTION.  The stuff about performatives in 
>the paper I helped write was intended to be a step towards bridging this 
>gap, since performatives in natural language are exactly where an 
>intention is expressed unambiguously by stating - describing - the intention.

As a possible contribution to a solution, I have been advocating tying 
English sentences computationally to predicates.  This seems to provide 
some useful INTENTION and context information without getting stuck in the 
full-natural-language-understanding-and-commonsense-reasoning tar pit.

It seems that others have noticed the potentially dangerous disconnect 
between URIs and human understanding, particularly when inferencing is 
done.  This can be caricatured as
X verylongoverloadedURI1 Y and
Y verylongoverloadedURI2 Z ==>
X verylongoverloadedURI3 Z

Of course, RDF specialists have some idea of what a URI means, without 
dereferencing it.  But for nontechnical folks, RDF looks more like the above.

Once the reasoning goes to several steps, the intentions behind the machine 
activity become completely opaque, even to RDF experts.

There's more about this in the "Semantic Web Presentation" at our site [1], 
and there are a number of reasoning examples (using English sentences for 
predicates) that you can run in a browser.

So, this raises a question.  To what extent does this technically simple 
and robust "lightweight natural language" approach satisfy the requirements 
that are emerging from this discussion?

                                 Cheers,  -- Adrian

Pat -  Could you post a pointer to your paper about performatives please?

Peter - Apologies if this is "formatted".  Eudora sometimes makes the 
format decision independently.


                                            INTERNET BUSINESS LOGIC

                                           [1]   www.reengineeringllc.com

Adrian Walker
Reengineering LLC
PO Box 1412
Bristol
CT 06011-1412 USA

Phone: USA 860 583 9677
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Received on Monday, 14 June 2004 17:39:36 UTC