- From: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:52:07 +0200
- To: John F. Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
- Cc: Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>, semantic-web@w3.org, Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>, Adrian Walker <adrianw@snet.net>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, p@virtualTaos.net, ONTAC-WG General Discussion <ontac-forum@colab.cim3.net>
On 28 Mar 2006, at 06:31, John F. Sowa wrote: > My complaint about the layer cake is that it puts the emphasis > on syntax (bottom layers) rather than semantics (logic). Even > then, it doesn't even recognize that there is something called > pragmatics. I think that John McCarthy's Elephant proposal > (from the late 1980s) was a lot closer to what is needed for > the SemWeb than the layer cake. See the following article: > > http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/arch.htm Yes the layer cake, putting xml at the bottom, puts too much emphasis on xml. But of course in reality no body relies on xml. We use turtle or N3. The xml serialisation of rdf was a huge mistake, but not a fatal one in the least. In fact the beauty of the Sem Web is that it is founded in Semantics very clearly, the serialisation is completely open. Speaking of following usage instead of inventing things from scratch, there is now quite a lot of experience with N3 rules. Hopefully the rules working group will take the experience from there and just formalise it. The AI winter and all those things are of limited relevance [1] to what is happening now. The past is not a guide to the future as any chicken in heaven will let you know. Could we please get back to talking about real Sem Web issues here. As far as reification goes, what most people want is graph quotation a la N3. Some form of that exists in SPARQL. We use it everyday. The standards folks in the W3C just have not quite caught up. Henry [1] http://bblfish.net/blog/page1.html
Received on Tuesday, 28 March 2006 06:52:24 UTC