Re: comment: working draft on n-ary relations note

  Dear Natashia,

Thank you for your kind reply. I understand well that the solutions 
proposed by the SWBP group concern only the W3C-supported languages; the 
problem (if any...) is that such languages are inherently binary, and 
that any solution (independently from the specific problem of 
"purchase") that will try to transform them into n-ary languages will 
always be, probably, "odd" and "artificial" to some extent.

On the other hand, the three examples you proposed in your working paper 
are clearly examples of "narratives", i.e., of documents or document 
fragments where the main part of the information content consists in the 
description of "events" concerning some "actors" (characters, 
personages, etc.) – the term "event" is taken here in its more general 
meaning, covering also strictly related notions like fact, action, 
state, situation etc. These actors try to attain a specific result, 
experience particular situations, manipulate some (concrete or abstract) 
materials, send or receive messages, buy, sell, deliver etc. Narratives 
are extremely important from an economic point of view, given that they 
represent the essential part of corporate knowledge documents (memos, 
policy statements, reports, minutes etc.), news stories, normative and 
legal texts, medical records, many intelligence messages, etc. Their 
importance is, by the way, demonstrated by the fact that you have felt 
there was a need to to take them into account, see you working paper. 
Unfortunately, narratives cannot be dealt with in a satisfactory way 
with the actual RDF/OWL-like tools, whether or not this should be a 
cause of concern to W3C.

With best regards,


G.P. Zarri



Natasha Noy wrote:

> Dear Gian,
>
> Thank you very much for your elaborate comments. It is interesting to 
> see how you would represent it in a different language (NKRL, in your 
> case). I would like to point out, however, that the mission of this 
> Working Group is to propose solutions specifically for RDF and OWL 
> languages -- the Semantic Web languages recommended by W3C.
>
> It is also not clear what is the problem with the generality that you 
> are referring to? Note that the goal of the note is not to present a 
> general solution on how you would represent anything with the verb 
> "purchase" in it, but rather how to express a certain knowledge 
> structure in RDF/OWL. You may have misinterpreted our goals.
>
> Thanks a lot again for your comments.
>
> Natasha
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 2004 10:30:24 UTC