Re: Can there be a URI for the concepts "I", "you", "this", "it", "here", "there", "now", etc.?

Ok. You are suggesting something like this. A set of statements in a 
context will be represented by a named graph[1]. And the URI of the 
named graph will, when http-dereferenced return an instance of a 
StatementContext class. And this context individual will have a 
property of utteredBySpeaker. And the individual in that slot will be 
the referent of a blank node in the enclosed named graph. And an 
application, with a custom, non-standard function, can then rewrite 
the graph to replace the blank node with the value of the 
utteredBySpeaker property of the context. After that, 
processing can continue acording to standards.

    @prefix contexts < http://www.kashori.com/ontology/contexts.owl# > .
    @prefix ex < http://example.com# > .

    contexts:Anouncement { _:I  ex:lifeStyleChange ex:married . }

The name of the graph when deferenced will retrieve an instance of 
StatementContext. 

    contexts:Announcement
          a       contexts:StatementContext ;
          contexts:utteredBySpeaker  contexts:JohnBlack .

Now a contexts-aware application could rewrite the first graph, 
substituting the speaker contexts:JohnBlack for the blank node _:I  
because in the context of 
http://www.kashori.com/ontology/contexts.owl#Announcement

_:I refers to contexts:JohnBlack

I'm putting more about this here:
http://kashori.com/wikiPim/SemanticWebStatementContexts

1.http://www.w3.org/2004/03/trix/

cheers,
John Black
www.kashori.com





Harry Halpin wrote,

>
> I think the methodology of contexts (which could also be thought of as a
> variation of named graphs, where the URI of the "name" names the
> context) that Joshua Tauberer has suggested might be the best for the
> time being.
>
> In essence, part of the problem is that "I" and "you" and other
> indexicals are actually "variables" that, as Joshua put it, then given
> in a context, map to individuals. Since there is no notion of a variable
> in RDF as it is (although there is in N3, and one would assume, whatever
> RIF turns out to be), well, then this is going to be hard to model
> coherently given current standards. It would, actually, be a good
> use-case for including variables in the SW layer cake.
>
> One aside - the treatment of deixis in formal semantics is hard (I'd
> recommend looking at Barwise and Perry's work in situation theory for
> one way to do it, and Guha's work on this is also excellent) and since
> by its very nature, formal semantics is trying to achieve some degree of
> context-independence, it's always going to be messy.
>
> However, I'd like to make an aside - in the Semantic Web  community,
> we're always striving for globally sharing information, and this means
> in practice elimating some of the context in order to share - and this
> will always do some violence to the subject matter being modelled, so no
> matter how hard we try to get context independence there's always going
> to be some level of brushing context under the carpet :)
>
> Furthermore, if we're going to use "context", we're going to need some
> way of putting it up front, and my bet is variables, possibly with
> "names" is the way to go.
>
> Joshua Tauberer wrote:
>> John Black wrote:
>>
>>> Are the following URI allowable according to web and semantic
>>> web standards? Are they ambiguous? Are they useful? In each case,
>>> the referent would depend on the context of the use[1] of the URI.
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#I
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#you
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#this
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#it
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#here
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#there
>>> http://kashori.com/ontology/indexicals.owl#now
>>>
>>
>> I think one of the major benefits of RDF is that applications completely
>> oblivious to any schemas can still at least make one conclusion about
>> URIs, which is that if two documents use the same URI, they are
>> referring to the same thing.  Context-dependent URIs break this.  It
>> might be fine in some cases, but in general it would break the principle
>> that <indexicals.owl#I> refers to the very same thing no matter where it
>> appears.
>>
>>
>>> Therefore they would only be of use if they could be embedded in a
>>> structure that specified a context.
>>>
>>
>> That would be fine, except afaik the only way to publish a triple in an
>> embedded context is with N3 formulas.  You can't, for instance, create
>> an embedded context in RDF/XML.  (It wouldn't be sufficient to add a
>> triple to an RDF/XML document to say "hey, this is one of those
>> documents where you interpret <indexicals.owl#I> as ME" because it
>> doesn't solve the problem that oblivious applications won't know to do
>> that.)
>>
>> But, there is a way to get around these problems, which is to use some
>> indirection.  Actually, that actually parallels the real-world side of
>> things.  That is, we're not all named "I" (in the sense that a URI is a
>> name for something).  "I" is really a function from a context to an
>> individual.  The closest thing to a function in RDF is a predicate, so
>> you could do this (in N3):
>>
>> <> indexicals:isBeingReadBy _:you .
>> <> indexicals:isBeingReadAtLocation _:here .
>> (then you go on to make assertions about _:you and _:here.)
>>
>> where <> is the URI for the document itself, and _:you and _:here are
>> bnodes.  Like this, an application isn't going to make the mistake that
>> the same person is the "I" of every document.  Here it says "someone is
>> reading the document", and just when the applications understands
>> indexicals:isBeingReadBy it can say "Oh, and _:you is actually me!".
>>
>> (I'm not positive that that actually solves every problem, but it seems
>> to be a step in the right direction.)
>>
>>
>
>
> -- 
> -harry
>
> Harry Halpin,  University of Edinburgh
> http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin 6B522426
>
>

Received on Friday, 22 December 2006 14:54:18 UTC