- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 08:07:19 -0500
- To: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- 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>
Jan Grant wrote: > > 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. The problem with treating this as a typo and fixing it is that all the implementations of reification that I've seen follow the spec as written. So it's of little use to change the spec now. I suspect the thing to do is to phase out the existing subject/predicate/object vocabulary and phase in a new one that works. This is just one more reason why the 1st draft of the model theory shouldn't include reification. > 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. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Friday, 31 August 2001 09:09:14 UTC