RE: live meaning and dead languages

Thread drift: WG Notes vs Rec
To Rick and Richard, about W3C process

==

Working group notes are not consensus documents and do not reflect a recommendation from the W3C.

Depending on the WG the exact status of a WG note (in terms of how many people thought it any good) varies a lot.

For the LBase WG note, if I remember correctly, there were a few (influential) members of the WG who liked it a lot; and none who disliked it enough to kill it, but I think the majority view was that it was irrelevant, but not worth obstructing. I believe almost all of the WG notes I have had anything to do with ever (about ten to fifteen notes, maybe more) have had significantly more support than this one.

A W3C recommendation is a much stronger document. & the RDF semantics has been reviewed by many people and is believed to be helpful, even given that many RDF users do not understand it (and are not expected to understand it - it is higher mathematics, which is not most people's favorite subject)

My take is that the RDF Semantics is a minimum semantics for RDF data, not that these are the only semantic processes allowed, and not that you have to implement the weak processes defined, but ... if you find RDF data, then you can be sure that the inferences licensed by this semantics do in fact hold; and if they don't then the problem is the document author's error, not an implementation error.

So while stronger processes (e.g. abduction) are permitted, they may or may not work; and you would probably want to make it clear to the user what was going on and provide appropriate user controls. Just plain RDFS inference, is probably best handled automatically with no user interaction at all, and possibly not even any user visibility that this is what's going on.



Jeremy



> -----Original Message-----
> From: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of rick
> Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 7:47 PM
> To: semantic-web@w3.org
> Subject: Re: live meaning and dead languages
> 
> 
> See below ...
> 
> Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> >
> > On 8 Feb 2009, at 18:11, rick wrote:
> >> As I have written before, the model theory on which the semantic web
> >> is based is defined in Alfred Tarski's Semantic Conception of Truth.
> >
> > Rick, that's overstating the role of model theory on the Semantic Web.
> 
> The statement above makes no reference to the ROLE of the model theory
> on the semantic web. But I'm glad you raised the issue. 
[...]
> Yes, that's my assertion, too. Did you have something more specific to
> say about which model theory? Possibly LBase?
> 
[...]

Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 06:19:04 UTC