Re: When are RDF statements asserted?

Hi Ora,

On 28 Mar 2006, at 19:31, Ora Lassila wrote:
...
>> Is it correct that out-of-band information (e.g. a web page stating
>> "All these files are up-to-date", or some nonstandard extension of
>> RDF) is necessary before an agent can safely act upon any RDF  
>> statement?
...
> IMHO, this is a question that could be asked about *any* document  
> that has
> been published, not just RDF documents. The question is more about  
> *who* is
> asserting. I could assert that, say, the Moon is made of cheese.  
> Whether
> someone else chooses to *believe* this is another matter. Whether I  
> assert
> that in RDF or in natural language is not so relevant.

Right. When you assert this in natural language, I can use out-of- 
band information ("common sense") to decide wether to trust your  
statement or not.

> The key responsibility (again, IMHO) of "Semantic Web agents" is to  
> make
> decisions (and inferences) about what information to trust, to use, to
> discard, to keep but not trust, etc.

That makes a lot of sense. Am I correct when I say that RDF and OWL,  
at the current state of standardization and common practice, don't  
provide a solution for this trust problem, and application developers  
are on their own?

Thanks,
Richard


>
> Regards,
>
>     - Ora
>
> -- 
> Ora Lassila  mailto:ora.lassila@nokia.com  http://www.lassila.org/
> Research Fellow, Nokia Research Center Cambridge
> Visiting Scientist, MIT/CSAIL
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 March 2006 18:25:04 UTC