- From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 13:52:21 +0100 (BST)
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- cc: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>, dehora <dehora@eircom.net>, w3c-rdfcore-wg <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Dan Connolly wrote: > Brian McBride wrote: > > > > pat hayes wrote: > > [...] > > > Wait a minute. The subject is a URI, not a Resource, right? The > > > Resource is what the subject (a piece of syntax) denotes, not the > > > subject itself. > > That's what you'd think, coming from a logic background, but > as Brian points out, RDF says the subject of > Mary hit the ball. > > is a female person, not a word starting with 'M'. > > This is mother of all use/mention bugs, IMO. Or possibly the single most annoying typo (they left out "the denotation of..." all the way through) in M+S. While it's quite common to infer the missing words from context, it's extremely harmful in this case. I think the missing words were _probably_ what was intended by the original M+S mob, but you'd have to ask them. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in understanding RDF seems to be realising the distinction between the denotation of and (for want of a better word) the dereferencing of a URI. I'm fairly sure that the original working group intended to do the "right" (ie, obvious) thing: evidence here is Ora's saying that he originally wanted to have a "URI" arc linking resource nodes with the addresses you could find them. -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk There's no convincing English-language argument that this sentence is true.
Received on Friday, 31 August 2001 08:53:20 UTC