Re: [URW3 public] Re: [URW3] ... three questions based on the last telecon

The public list seems to work,

Dear all, first of all I am very happy about this discussion (especially 
before the URSW deadline (who is going to submit what?)) and thankfully 
for answers.

      First of all, syntax is not important for me, I was speaking 
conceptually, what I refer to, is the binary model (like RDF, OWL or 
most of DL's (a poor first order relative)). So far we can represent the 
Thing by an oriented graph - it is there, even XML is an oriented graph 
(under some assumptions).
      I am not suggesting to use reification, I just used it in an 
example. My point is simple, where we (XG-URW3) are going - to convince 
people that we need extension of W3C standards - how to achieve the goal 
- by use cases and/or examples - I have used reification to explain that 
in our model we need to have both the structure of 
(sentence/proposition/statement) and speaking about these - e.g. who is 
the author, who (person/tool) assigned a uncertainty degree to it, 
....(when - our uncertainty about the statement can change in time..) 
and it is already possible using W3c standards
      Of course syntax can and is important when handling syntactical 
object and some notations make it easier (like RDF/XML) or even the DOM 
model of it.
      I think RDF is quite expressive (I do not say optimal, effective 
nor easy to read) because subject - predicate - object REFERS TO 
linguistic subject - verb - object, and so far humans are able (or at 
least some try to) understand each other, it is not so bad.
     Of course I know from databases that every relation can be 
decomposed to several binary, but the price (to effectiveness) to pay is 
large. I have colleagues which developed a small generalization of RDF, 
a "heap data model" where instead of three columns they have some more 
for most common reifications - time stamp, author,... of the triple 
hidden in first three entries of the relation row.
       So I agree to use some more readable notation than triples (but 
conforming with W3C standards).
      By the way, even if "the Ontology is *not* meant to describe how 
to capture uncertainty in practice." then I ask: what is a measure of 
ontology being relevant to our problems. I think we already have 
reification in our model of uncertainty, namely in the the fact that the 
uncertainty is attached to a sentence (or as is our discussion some say 
rather to proposition). I argue that even the triple
        urw3:Sentence      urw3:hasUncertainty  urw3:Uncertainty
is a subject to further statements, e.g. who said this.
      Our charter says "However, the entire use case collection would 
provide a basis for discussing whether the recommended set is sufficient 
to advocate further actions along the W3C Recommendation Track, either 
as a separate Recommendation or as part of other related work." I 
advocate for compatibility with W3C standards (maybe via some 
transformations, mappings, extensions,...at least in the sense, that a 
fully certain model is the W3C one).
      To conclude: My point of view is, that the information on the web 
is not attached with an uncertainty as it is, it always depends on the 
interpreter, how much do I know about the author (security, trust 
issues), what is my background knowledge, ... in the social web - who 
else attached an uncertainty to this, how respectable, trustworthy these 
are,...
      And last, I do not speak about uncertainty examples, which are 
uncertain even when not on the web - like diagnosis in medicine or the 
weather :-)
      greetings Peter

Received on Monday, 16 July 2007 12:51:31 UTC