Re: A use case for anon nodes - action from telecon

At 05:52 PM 7/18/01 -0500, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>>The essence of this issue seems to involve the idea that the
>>act of naming something in the internet is somehow, special.
>>That if a processor is told that something has URI ISBN-12345
>>or whatever, it had better not match that with anything that
>>it does not 'know' is named ISBN-12345.  On the other hand,
>>if a node is not named, then it can be matched with anything
>>that matches its properties.
>
>Pat Hayes has said repeatedly that one can pretty much only infer from an 
>existential the same things they could from a specific identifier. 
>Obviously, he has studied this more than I have, but it seems to me that 
>people are asking anonymous nodes to mean more than they really do.

I agree with your last statement (for some value of "really do mean", since 
that's for us collectively to define).

I think the other part of Pat's position here is that when the variable is 
used in the query role (i.e. "does something satisfying <foo> exist?" or 
"Looking for something that satisfies <foo>"), it is NOT being used as an 
existential but (in some sense) as a universally quantified value.

#g


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Graham Klyne                    Baltimore Technologies
Strategic Research              Content Security Group
<Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com>    <http://www.mimesweeper.com>
                                 <http://www.baltimore.com>
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Received on Thursday, 19 July 2001 05:10:48 UTC