- From: Frank Manola <fmanola@mitre.org>
- Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 16:46:29 -0400
- To: "Aaron Swartz (by way of Ralph R. Swick <swick@w3.org>)" <me@aaronsw.com>
- CC: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
"Aaron Swartz (by way of Ralph R. Swick )" wrote: > snip > > On Monday, July 23, 2001, at 11:02 PM, pat hayes wrote: > > > I guess there is a genuine cultural clash here. Are we supposed > > to define a precise meaning for RDF, or are we supposed to take > > a breezy hack-it-up-if-we-need-it attitude to what RDF is all > > about? I'm quite happy to take either road, but we need to get > > the question clear, since the two attitudes arent really > > compatible. The breezy approach has the merit of making > > anything as precise as a model theory entirely pointless, so I > > would have a lot less work to do. > > Maybe we should keep it breezy for 1.0 and save the model theory > for 2.0. I think it'll be sort of hard to retrofit semantics > onto RDF when many folks haven't followed them (as we've seen). > It also gives the whole group less work to do and a chance to > spend time on issues that will affect the entire RDF community > (as opposed to the logicians, etc. who are interested in a model > theory). Well, this is only indirectly about model theory. I can understand how the entire RDF community may not feel a compelling need for a thingie [ahem!] titled "model theory", but how about a somewhat clearer RDF M&S? One, say, that clarified how anonymous nodes were to be interpreted and handled. You have to keep in mind that Pat's comment was extracted from a message in a thread in which it was being suggested that anonymous nodes could be used to represent variables in queries (or templates). Now, that may or may not be a reasonable thing to do, but it is certainly out of the blue as far as my interpretation of RDF was concerned. I always thought RDF was intended for making assertions about resources. If I encountered some RDF on the Web, it was making assertions about some resources. Similarly, if someone *sent me* some RDF, they were sending me some assertions about some resources. I wouldn't have interpreted that RDF as a query (and I'd hence have misinterpreted any anonymous resources in that RDF if that were the intent). Now, as far as I can tell, the M&S today doesn't contain anything that describes using RDF to represent queries and templates. That doesn't necessarily mean those uses are excluded or unreasonable, but I claim that if we think that using RDF in these ways *is* legitimate, it's our job to say so very clearly, and illustrate and explain those uses in the M&S. -- Frank Manola The MITRE Corporation 202 Burlington Road, MS A345 Bedford, MA 01730-1420 mailto:fmanola@mitre.org voice: 781-271-8147 FAX: 781-271-8752
Received on Tuesday, 24 July 2001 16:47:33 UTC