Re: Examples of Syntax and semantics

Thanks,
Seems more straight forward than a worked example based on "knows".

> Tim:
> * In ontology 4 ... Alice and Diane
> are neither married nor unmarried (un-married means having been through
> a divorce. Married means married now).
>
1. A little point here. We (in my work) have been working with XML and have
rellied on text fields returning being empty, which becomes a null string in
our implementation in Java, to mean something! For instance the category
"yes", "no" and "neither" where neither is the null. I think that the sort
of solution Henry might offer has consequences for implementation. It is
just this sort of issue I would look to ontology to help solve, to guide
developers away from such poor implementations. That is aside from other
benefits such as a flexible rules framework.
2. This brings me to another issue. While I can't give an example in answer
to Henry, I can say that I am interested in the following, which I think I
have raised elsewhere on this list.
If one is working with XML schema what would be entailed to decorate it so
that it could be used as RDF? Is this commonly done, are there tools, and if
not why not?
Adam

On 07/04/06, tim.glover@bt.com <tim.glover@bt.com> wrote:
>
>
> Henry,
>
>
> >> Henry,
> >> Thank you for the useful reply.
> >> But I don't think this deals with the issues of mediation between
> >> two similar but semantically disjoint ontologies.
>
> >Show me one, and I'll look at how we can link them (if it does not
> >take too long)
>
>
> OK, here is one attempt at a challenge (adam - sorry if I have missed
> the point)
>
> ********************************************
> Imagine 4 ontologies. All describe the class People, and subclasses
> Married and Unmarried.
>
> Suppose that Clive was married but is now divorced. Diane was married
> but is now widowed. Alice has never been married, and Bill is married.
>
> * In ontology 1, Clive and Diane are unmarried (unmarried means
> unmarried now)
>
> * In ontology 2, Clive and Diane are married (married means has gone
> through a marriage ceremony).
>
> * In ontology 3, Clive and Diane are both married and unmarried (married
> means has been married once, unmarried means not married now)
>
> * In ontology 4 Clive is unmarried, Bill is married, and Alice and Diane
> are neither married nor unmarried (un-married means having been through
> a divorce. Married means married now).
>
> How do you map these ontologies?
>
> ***********************************************
>
> >That notion is one that we keep telling you is not part of the
> >Semantic Web. It is *your* vision of the Semantic Web.
> >You have a straw man argument. You imagine we are doing something we
> >are not doing. Then you prove that what you imagine we are doing is
> >impossible. And you wrongly conclude that what we are doing is
> >impossible. Please distinguish between what you think we are doing and
>
> >what we are doing.
>
> Who are "We" exactly? People that you happen to agree with? ;-)
>
> Tim.
>