RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

>>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.
>
>No, that is exactly what they do not provide. That is John's point: 
>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. If enough people say that Jack and 
>Jill are married, in the right way and under the right 
>circumstances, then they are married. If I say "I promise to buy you 
>lunch" then an actual promise got created: I performed a social act 
>by saying that I was performing it. Very handy, that is: it gets you 
>from mere descriptions (which we indubitably have in RDF and OWL) to 
>actual intentional actions: it gets assertings (denials, explicit 
>non-assertings, endorsements, whatever) actually done, and in a 
>publicly checkable way rather than being left implicit.
>
>>

Ah, right right right -- I knew you logician types have this bug up 
your butts about "intent" -- and that is why I put it in scare 
quotes, but I should have made it even clear i was using the term in 
an informal and not a technical sense -- however, that said,I think 
it is this hangup with "intent" somehow being a mysterious thing that 
is largely to blame for our lack of progress on this social meaning 
stuff

Consider, if you go to my HTML web page you will see a link to a page 
that has pictures of my daughter.  You have no way to know what my 
intent was in putting them there -- you can guess at some 
possibilities (wrong, I was not trying to raise the price that would 
be offered for her on the black market) but you can't know what I had 
in mind.  If I had labeled those photos in RDF, OWL, or KIF there is 
no reason why I would have told you one whit more about my intent -- 
I might have made it unambiguous that I was averring that the person 
depicted in the photograph was one with whom I had the familiar 
relationship of type daughter -- but you still wouldn't have any 
intent behind it.

So if we simply can argue w/respect to what the links state (in the 
factual sense) and attribute their ownership based on where they are 
asserted (oops, I mean where the bit stream defining them is found - 
since assertion is another bug up the arse) - then perhaps we could 
have made some useful progress on stating "what's in a link"


>>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
>
>Well, yes, but (IMO) only because such dereferencing is the only way 
>to establish any kind of link between a URI and anything that can be 
>plausibly attributed agency. In order for a promise (etc) to be 
>done, there has to be an agent doing the promising. Similarly for 
>asserting, denying, etc. . Without agents (and I really do mean 
>SOCIAL agents, not software agents) in the picture, all we have is 
>sentences being looked at: nothing is asserted at all.

well, we humans seem to be social agents who handle this assertional 
stuff just fine - we know how to differentiate (at least in 
principle) between "what Pat said" and "What I think Pat meant" - and 
we usually conditionalize the latter in civil discourse -- seems to 
me our Sem Web agents could do the same and we could move on to 
actually looking at this use of dereferencable URIs as something that 
could add a lot of power to the SW if we had some social 
conventions/expectations.

(i.e. I claim I am legitimized to believe that Peter believes that he 
is a perfect being by dint of stating it on his page -- I may be 
wrong, but then I'm usually wrong about what Peter believes, so 
what's different about this?)
-- 
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 Monday, 14 June 2004 19:07:52 UTC