Re: completion of action: 2001-07-27#2 (long) (use/mention in reification)

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