- From: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) <dbooth@hp.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:09:58 +0000
- To: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, "martin.hepp@uibk.ac.at" <martin.hepp@uibk.ac.at>
- CC: Ian Emmons <iemmons@bbn.com>, "semantic-web@w3c.org" <semantic-web@w3c.org>
> On Jul 10, 2008, at 7:09 PM, Martin Hepp wrote: > > Current ontology infrastructure requires that we reach > consensus first. Human communication on the contrary allows > us to postpone dispute and clarification to a later point in > time in which the disagreement becomes relevant, if it ever > gets relevant. This sounds overly pessimistic to me. Yes, some things in the semantic web *do* need to be agreed in advance, such as the general rules for determining the meaning of a statement. But individual ontologies do not -- they can be developed independently and only adopted as needed -- and there is nothing to stop an application from taking a lazy evaluation approach to semantic web data just as humans do. An application could postpone determining the meaning of a particular RDF statement (which involves determining the meaning of its constituent URIs) until it is needed, sort of like a backward chaining reasoning style: start with the goal, and then figure out what information is needed to reach that goal. And if a particular statement never ends up being needed, so be it. David Booth, Ph.D. HP Software +1 617 629 8881 office | dbooth@hp.com http://www.hp.com/go/software Statements made herein represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of HP unless explicitly so stated.
Received on Friday, 11 July 2008 17:11:42 UTC