- From: Golda Velez <gv@btucson.com>
- Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 12:55:54 -0700
- To: Story Henry <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
On Thursday 06 March 2008 3:18, Story Henry wrote: > If you want to make statements as complex as that then you should use > N3. It is perhaps not a bad thing that the more widespread RDF > serialisations do not make it easy to make statements about > statements. Life is already complicated enough with getting people to > express what they believe. Having people start making statements about > what they believe other people believe, or statements about what they > believe other people should assume other people believe, would really > make things a lot more complicated, and not necessarily any better. Well - respectfully, I disagree with that statement ;-) I think progress comes thru discussion and its very hard to have a discussion if you can't refer to something someone said...if RDF won't make that easy, then we have to keep the 'real' stuff in English, or whatever language we're talking in. I guess I have a fundamentally different view of the usefulness of RDF - making everything susceptable to machine logic seems to me premature, but making tools to help humans apply structure and logic to information seems very apt. So I'm looking at RDF apps more as manually operated tools than as complete control systems. > > But if you really need to play with that use N3. The best is to try to > keep things as simple as possible. Hm - I might use N3 on the back end eventually, right now its all mysql and perl - but the presentation end is what I'm working on currently, and that has to be something browser-parsable. Anyway, thanks for the perspective! --Golda ps I can't help it - another riff: I think assuming that definitions are factual rather than personal representations of reality is one of the reasons that there has been some problems getting domain ontologies created. I remember reading a quote from a US Senator, that whoever is in charge of the definitions wins the argument. Rules and definitions beg for discussion in any field that is under 100 years old...
Received on Thursday, 6 March 2008 19:46:23 UTC