Re[2]: Interpretation of RDF reification

Azamat,
Great !!
Look at the "To keep abreast of the 21st Century" paper once
more - http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/21abreast.htm

Leonid Ototsky - http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it

> The hot polemics over the subject is likely caused by the fact that one
> determinant dimension of meaning has not received a due attention in the SW
> formal languages. Additionally to syntactic and semantic aspects, there is a
> pragmatical meaning involving an agent's mental states and communicative
> acts (speech events in a certain speech situation, or context). For the
> pragmatics studies how the cognitive agent produces and understands 
> linguistic communication and thus distinguishing the sentence 
> (denotative+connotative) meaning and the speaker (expressive) meaning. In
> pragmatics, a sign is an entity that indicates (represents) another entity
> to some agent (a human, animal or robot) for some purpose.
> We all (or most of us) know that the meaning is a triadic relationship (a
> significance triple) composed of the sign domain, the agent (interpretant)
> domain, and the realm of extra-linguistic and extra-mental entities. As a
> special binary relation, the pragmatic meaning function P (like stating
> something) then designates a relationship between an agent and a proposition
> (at a given time of utterance): P (a, p, t). What intutively implies that by
> each utterance a cognitive agent both states (tells, says) as well as
> performs some communicative act and so informing or misinforming, showing an
> attitude, stating a fact, or transmitting its ideas, thoughts or feelings.
> For example, ''Galileo knew that the earth moves around the sun'' falls into
> a common pragmatic structure P (a, p, t) :
> Knowing function (a person [Galileo], a proposition [the earth move around
> the sun], time [ ], truth value [ ])

> Bottom line:
> A formal theory of meaning, the base of meaningful Web, should be 
> constructed as a formal semiotics relied on foundation ontology rather than
> as a formal semantics based on formal logic. A correct way WAS to build the
> RDF/OWL semiotics covering the relationships of signs, agents and things,
> that is, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

> Azamat Abdoullaev
> http://www.eis.com.cy


> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Frank Manola" <fmanola@acm.org>
> To: "Joshua Tauberer" <tauberer@for.net>
> Cc: "Dan Brickley" <danbri@danbri.org>; "Lars Marius Garshol" 
> <larsga@ontopia.net>; <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 1:07 AM
> Subject: Re: Interpretation of RDF reification


>>
>> In 
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2004JanMar/0050.html
>> Pat Hayes also provides a good explanation of this point (that is, if Dan
>> will forgive dragging Superman into the discussion again!  You also should
>> substitute "Lois" for "Louis" in reading Pat's text.)  Pat also has some
>> useful things to say about "alternative ways to encode de dicto 
>> assertions".
>>
>> --Frank
>>
>> Joshua Tauberer wrote:
>>> Dan Brickley wrote:
>>>> Let's ask it if the resource <registrar-1.rdf> is the dc:source of an
>>>> rdf:Statement
>>>> that has a predicate 'wife', subject
>>>> <tag:danbri.org:2006:people:charlie> and
>>>> object <tag:danbri.org:2006:people:alice>:
>>>
>>> To recap, the moral of Dan's story is that RDF-reification doesn't track
>>> the actual URI someone used in a document, and this leads to
>>> non-intuitive semantics in this case:
>>>
>>> _:s1 rdf:type rdf:Statement .
>>> _:s1 rdf:subject ex:bob .
>>> _:s1 dc:source <registrar-1.rdf> .
>>>
>>> ex:bob owl:sameAs ex:charlie .
>>>
>>> ASK: { ?s rdf:subject ex:charlie  .
>>>        ?s dc:source <registrar-1.rdf> . }
>>> --> YES
>>>
>>> Two minor points to add to Dan.  First, as Dan points out,
>>> RDF-reification isn't appropriate for tracking the actual URIs people
>>> are using in documents.  The reason for this, though, is that in RDF,
>>> URIs aren't things we can refer *to*.  There's no way to assert
>>> something about a particular URI itself, i.e. that *that* URI was used
>>> in some document, unless you create a new vocabulary.  (That makes a lot
>>> of sense, really, because how would you ever know if a URI was there to
>>> mean the denoted entity, or the URI itself?)
>>>
>>> The second point is that while the SPARQL query might be unintuitive, we
>>> actually have the same problem in English.  In semantics this is called
>>> the "de re"/"de dicto" distinction.  To roughly translate the SPARQL
>>> query into English we get:
>>>
>>> Q:  "Does <registrar-1.rdf> refer to a man named Charlie?"
>>>
>>> This question is ambiguous and would be true in both of these situations:
>>>
>>> 1)  I know someone named Bob Smith.  I have a document <registrar-1.rdf>
>>> which mistakenly thinks Bob's name is Charlie.   About Bob
>>> <registrar-1.rdf> says "Charlie is nice." (de dicto)
>>>
>>> 2)  I know someone named Charlie Smith.  About him, <registrar-1.rdf>
>>> says "Mr. Smith is nice." (de re)
>>>
>>> In the first case, <registrar-1.rdf> refers to a man using the name
>>> Charlie even though that's not his real name.  (But the answer to the
>>> English question about could still be 'yes'.)  This is the 'desired' RDF
>>> interpretation in Dan's use case.
>>>
>>> In the second case, <registrar-1.rdf> refers to a man, who is named
>>> Charlie, but without using that name.  (And you could still answer 'yes'
>>> to the English question.)  This is actually what RDF defines, and in
>>> this light a 'yes' answer to the SPARQL query also makes a lot of sense.
>>>  So while in English both the de dicto and de re readings are available,
>>> in RDF you only have de re interpretations of URIs.
>>>
>> 





-- 
С уважением,
 Leonid                          mailto:leo@mgn.ru

Received on Friday, 24 March 2006 17:19:44 UTC