- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 14:49:15 -0700
- To: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
- Message-Id: <v04210100b78784cc7ee9@[130.107.66.237]>
RDF Model Theory StrawDog proposal (draft 7/27/01)(typos fixed in sections 1 thru 5, sections 6,7,8 added.) Pat Hayes, IHMC In what follows, 'N-triples' refers to Dave Beckett's version 5, relevant parts of which are: ntripleDoc ::=line* line ::=ws* (comment | blankline | triple) eoln triple ::=subject ws+ predicate ws+ object ws* '.' ws* subject ::=uriref | anonNode predicate ::=uriref object ::=uriref | anonNode | qLiteral 1. Introduction The basic idea is to re-state the M&S notions of what a set of RDF triples means in mathematical terms, making as few extra or gratuitous assumptions as possible. By keeping things as general as possible, any restrictions that someone might want to impose can be captured by further restrictions on the model theory. We assume that: a. there is no restriction on what a resource can be b. there is no restriction on the domains and ranges of properties; in particular, a property may be applied to itself. c. all nodes in an RDF graph play fundamentally the same role in the language no matter how they are labelled (for comments on anonymous nodes, see later.) 2. Interpretations First, we assume a global set LV of literal values and a fixed mapping XL from the set of qLiterals to LV. All interpretations will be required to conform to XL on qLiteral expressions. <comment> This leaves open the question of the exact nature of literals, their language-sensitivity and so on, while acknowledging their special status as expressions with a 'fixed' interpretation. </comment> All interpretations will be relative to a set of RDF nodes, called the vocabulary of the interpretation, so that one has to speak, strictly, of an interpretation of an RDF 'nodespace' or of an RDF graph, rather than of RDF itself. This is stated in terms of RDF nodes and graphs to follow the M&S. For N-triples, we can identify the vocabulary of I with a set of expressions that would be mapped to nodes by a parser, so it would be a subset of (uriref |anonNode) <comment> Restricting an interpretation to a particular namespace is normal practice in model theory, since an interpretation mapping is expected to interpret only a given set of 'names'. It is possible to adopt a 'global' approach where any interpretation assigns a meaning to every possible expression, but this makes the subsequent development more awkward. For example, there are no 'new names' in a global model theory, since all names have already been given a fixed meaning by every interpretation. </comment> An interpretation I (of vocab(I)) is defined by: 1. A nonempty set R of resources, called the domain or universe of I. <comment> Whatever resources are, this a set of those. </comment> 2. A non-empty subset P of R corresponding to properties <comment> Note that P could be R itself.</comment> 3. A mapping IEXT: P -> Rx(R union LV) (ie the set of pairs <x,y> with x in R and y in R or LV) <comment> IEXT(x) is the extension of x. This allows a property to be an object and so occur in its own extension, a neat trick I learned from Chris Menzel. </comment> 4. A mapping IS: vocab(I) -> R The denotation of an RDF expression E in I is given by the following rules (note, other rules follow later): >> if E is a <uriref> or <anonNode> then I(E) = IS(E) >> if E is a <qLiteral> then I(E) = LV(E) >> if E is an asserted triple with the form s p o then I(E) = true iff <I(s),I(o)> is in IEXT(I(p)), otherwise I(E)= false. >> if E is a set of triples then I(E) = false just in case I(E') = >>false for some asserted triple E' in E, otherwise I(E) = true. (Note that if E contains no asserted triples then I(E)= true. This is the usual convention: an empty conjunction is considered to be true since it contains nothing that would cause it to be false. This makes empty assertions have vacuous content, as one would expect.) Comments and blanklines have no semantics, of course. The use of the phrase "asserted triple" is a deliberate weasel-worded artifact, to allow an RDF graph/document to contain triples which are being used for some non-assertional purpose (such as expressing a query, implementing part of some expression of another language, or forming part of a pattern intended to be matched against some asserted RDF in another document, or just being breezy:-). We may wish to say that strict conformity to the RDF M&S assumes that all triples in a document are asserted triples, but making the distinction allows RDF parsers and engines such as CWM and Euler to conform to the RDF syntax and to respect the RDF model theory without necessarily being fully committed to it. Also, I expect that future extensions or versions of RDF will require such non-asserted triples, and this allows the model theory to be extended in those future directions. (We will give examples of interpretations in an abbreviated format simply by listing R, IEXT and IS in the form R/IEXT/IS. P is the domain of IEXT. For example, for the vocabulary {a b c} the following is a small interpretation: {1 2}/1->{<1,1>,<2,2>}/a->1,b->1,c->2 which makes the set a b a c a c true, and all the triples a c b a b c c c c false) 3. Anonymous nodes as existential assertions This notion of interpretation treats anonymous nodes exactly like URIs, semantically speaking. It amounts to adopting the view that an anonymous node is equivalent to a node with an unknown URI. However, we could adopt an extra clause which would treat an anonymous node like an existentially quantified variable. To do so requires that we decide on the 'scope' of the quantification. The easiest convention to state would be that the scope was the triple, but that seems unworkable since the same anonymous node may occur in several triples in a given document. To make the quantification have the scope of the entire document requires introducing the notion of 'document' into the syntax, however. I am not sure how to do this in the RDF graph model, but in N-triples I will take it that the appropriate syntax class is <ntripleDoc>. This will require some definitions. If I is an interpretation and A is a mapping from some set of anonNodes to the domain of I, then define I[A] to be the interpretation which is like I except that I[A](x)=A(x) wherever A is defined, ie I[A] uses the A-mapping to assign values wherever it can, and otherwise is identical to I. If E is an <ntripleDoc>, define anon(E) to be the set of anonymous nodes in E, and set(E) to be the set of asserted triples in E. Then we have the extra interpretation rule: >> If E is an <ntripleDoc> then I(E) = true if I[A](set(E))=true for >>some A defined on anon(E), otherwise I(E)= false . This effectively treats all anonymous nodes as existentially quantified at the boundary of the document containing them. This requires us to make a conceptual distinction between a document (containing anonNodes) and the set of triples in the document; the anonymous nodes are free in the set, but bound by an implicit existential quantifier in the document. (Notice that if the document E contains no anonNodes, then I(E)=I(set(E)) ) The distinction becomes important when we combine documents, since the result of unifying two documents may not have the same meaning as combining the two sets of triples into a single document. (The difference will be significant only if the two documents share an anonymous node. If this is guaranteed to be impossible, then we do not need to make the distinction; still, however, it will not be true in general that any document is equal to the union of the documents formed by dividing it up into subsets.) We will use the neutral term 'RDF expression' to refer to a triple, a set of triples, or a document. It is convenient to define the vocabulary of an RDF expression to be the set of 'names' in it which are 'free'. The vocabulary of a triple is the set of <uriref>s and <anonNode>s in the triple; the vocabulary of a set of triples is the union of the vocabularies of the triples in the set; and the vocabulary of a document E is the set of <urirefs> in the vocabulary of set(E). The anonNodes of a document are bound and are not part of the vocabulary. (The correspondence to the earlier usage of this word is that the vocabulary of an interpretation of an expression must contain the vocabulary of the expression in order for the interpretation to give a well-defined value to the expression.) 4. Terminology We say that I satisfies E if I(E)=true, and that E entails E' iff every interpretation which satisfies E also satisfies E'. More subtle relationships require some definitions. (These are standard mathematical definitions for arbitrary mappings, given here for completeness.) If M is a subset of the vocabulary of I, define I\M to be the restriction of I to M, ie I\M(x)=I(x) on M. We will also say that I is an extension of I\M. If I and I' have the same restriction to the intersection of their vocabularies, then say they are compatible, and define the union I+I' of I and I' to be the interpretation whose vocabulary is the union of the vocabularies of I and of I', and which agrees with them on their vocabularies, ie (I+I')(x)=I(x) or =I'(x) wherever the latter are defined. Notice that if vocab(I) contains no anonNodes, then I[A] = I+A. Obviously, I satisfies E iff I\vocabulary(E) satisfies E. 5. Skolemisation If we replace an anonNode by a uriref, the result is not entailed by the original document. In fact, in general, if E' contains any urirefs not contained in E then E cannot entail E'. For example, the document containing the single triple <foo> <baz> _:xxx obviously bears some relation to the triple <foo> <baz> <bar> but it does not entail it, since the interpretation {1,2}/1->{<1,1>}/{foo->1,baz->1,bar->2} satisfies the first document but not the second. (Notice this interpretation assigns a value to something - <bar> - outside the vocabulary of the first document, which is how the entailment fails.) However, the second triple entails the first document, since any interpretation which satisfies <foo> <bar> <baz> can be used to make the first document true by restricting it to the smaller vocabulary and assigning the interpretation of <bar> to the anonNode to provide a suitable I[A] mapping. More significantly, any RDF expression which is entailed by the second triple and does not contain <bar> is also entailed by the first document. To see why, suppose E'' is such an expression and I is an interpretation on {<foo>,<bar>} which satisfies the first document. Then there must be a mapping A from _:xxx to the universe of I such that I+A satisfies the first triple. Define I' on the second triple by I'(<bar>)=A(_:xxx), then I' satisfies the second triple, so it must satisfy E''; but E'' does not contain <bar>, so it must be satisfied by I'\{<foo>,<bar>}, which is I; so, I satisfies E''; but I was arbitrary, so, E'' is entailed by the first document. QED. This is in fact a general result. We can characterise skolemisation as follows. Consider a document E and another sk(E) got from E by replacing all its anonNodes by urirefs drawn from a 'new' vocabulary V which does not intersect vocab(E). Then sk(E) entails E, and if E' is any expression with no vocabulary in V and sk(E) entails E', then E entails E'. (The proof follows exactly the special case given in the previous paragraph, but takes longer to state because it has to refer to anon(E).) Notice that since sk(E) contains no anonNodes, I(sk(E))=I(set(sk(E))) for any I, so there is no need to distinguish a skolemised document from its set of triples. The key to proper skolemisation is the use of skolem names which are guaranteed to never occur in any other document, thereby ensuring that any other expression in any other document which is entailed by the skolem form is also entailed by the original existential form. (The reverse follows trivially.) This is the sense in which anonNodes used in asserted triples can be replaced by urirefs without any significant 'loss of content', if the document is considered to be an assertion. 6. Entailment In this section we give a few basic results about entailment in RDF. (Note, these results do not take account of extra semantic restrictions imposed by rdfs, and will be reconsidered when those are introduced.) Since the language is so simple, entailment can be recognized by relatively simple syntactic comparisons. The two basic forms of valid proof step in RDF are, in logical terms, the inference of P from P and Q, and the inference of (exists (?x) (foo ?x)) from (foo baz). Proofs are given in an appendix. Lemma 1. (subset lemma) Suppose E and E' are sets of triples (not documents!). Then E entails E' iff E contains E'. The basic insight here is that the triples in a set (ie with no existential quantification) can be assigned interpretations essentially independently of one another simply by adjusting the extensions of the properties; there is no 'connection' between the truth of one triple and the truth of another. This in turn is a reflection of the fact that one cannot express the material conditional in RDF, because RDF has no disjunction. To describe implication relationships between documents we need to be precise about instantiating 'variables'. If E is an expression and v is a (syntactic) mapping from a set of anonNodes to urirefs, then let v(E) be the expression obtained by replacing every anonNode x in E by v(x) when v(x) is defined. v(E) will be called an instance of E. An expression containing no anonNodes will be called a ground RDF expression. Lemma 2. (instance lemma) Suppose E is a document and v(E) an instance of E. Then v(E) entails E . Lemma 3 (RDF interpolation lemma) Suppose E and E' are documents. Then E entails E' iff there is a set F of triples such that set(E) contains F and F is an instance of set(E'). What this means, in effect, is that pure RDF proofs need only be one step 'deep'. 7. Publishing content: assertion versus query. The model theory characterizes truth-preserving relations between expressions (documents) but it does not specify what exactly is being 'said' when a document is published. <comment> This is what one would expect, since publications are tantamount to speech acts rather than expressions. The same expression can, notoriously, be used to do various different things: it can be asserted, questioned, doubted, assented to, etc. </comment> The most obvious assumption is that to publish an RDF expression is to assert that it is true, thereby in effect offering a warranty for anyone else to draw valid conclusions from it. Let us call this a descriptive or asserting publication. It can be characterized as making a public claim about the appropriate uses of the expression; in effect, it says: this can be correctly used to make inferences from. However, the model theory would apply just as well to a different kind of publication, where the intended meaning is not that it is appropriate to draw conclusions from the expression, but that inference is intended to go in the other direction, so that the publication says, in effect: this should be used to make inferences to; or, in other words, can anyone prove this? If we represent E entails E' by writing (E |=> E'), then assertional publication of E might be represented as (E |=> ??) , putting E at the blunt end of the arrow, while the other case - which we can call a querying publication - might be written as putting E at the sharp end of the entailment, (?? |=> E); where in each case the world in general (or the community to which the publication is addressed) is being invited to fill in the ?? blanks. This picture is almost certainly too simplistic as it stands, since one would presume that the intention of publishing a query is not merely to advertise a potential conclusion, but would include an implicit request to be told about any assumptions out there that would entail it. This could be handled by a general assumption about various kinds of publication acts and their associated protocols; but in any case, RDF has no way to make this distinction at present. I mention it only to try to clarify the distinctions that have arisen in discussions. We could propose a related language to RDF which might be called Resource Querying Format, which is identical to RDF except that RQF expressions are understood to be queries rather than assertions. <joke> The syntax of RQF could be identical to RDF except that an RQF document must end with the string ",eh?". </joke> The processing appropriate to RQF would be somewhat different from that for RDF. In particular, anonNodes in RQF documents would have to be treated as genuine variables which can be bound to values at run time. A unification process which binds an RQF variable to an RDF uriref or anonNode would be a central part of the machinery for linking RDF assertions to the RQF queries which they entail. 8. Shared meanings and relative entailment. Some rdf and rdfs triples are considered to have a fixed meaning, and these meanings can be captured by requiring that all interpretations satisfy some additional equations or rules, which might include some constraints on the universe. For example, the RDF machinery for reification requires that the universe contain enough things to be the reifications of the reified expressions, and that the denotations of the urirefs rdf:Statement, rdf:subject, rdf:predicate and rdf:object are all given fixed values which produce a 'mirror' of the syntax in the interpretation. These extra constraints wil be introduced as the various rdf and rdfs constructs are mentioned in later sections. More generally, the successful operation of the web seems to require that some meanings are 'shared' between those who publish content on the web and those who read it. For example, the file-locating protocols that utilize URI syntax to enable web browsing software to locate web pages consitutute a commonly accepted core of 'shared meaning' which is assumed to be available to the entire community without needing to be stated explicitly in assertional form. Exactly what counts as 'shared meaning' seems to be a matter for further discussion, but we can represent the idea here in a simple way by characterizing such sharing as a set of interpretations (for part of the shared vocabulary) which are 'accepted as reasonable' by all members of a community, so that they consider semantic notions such as entailment to be restricted only to interpretations which extend one or more of those shared interpretations. To make this precise we need to define a notion of 'relative entailment'. Suppose COM is a set of interpretations. Then E entails E' relative to COM just in case every interpretation which is compatible with an interpretation in COM and satisfies E, also satisfies E'. What this does, in effect, is to rule out interpretations that are inconsistent with everything in COM as possible counterexamples to a claim of valid entailment, thereby making it 'easier' for one expression to entail another. Intuitively, E does not have to explain so much in order to make E' follow from it, since the content expressed by the restriction to compatibility with a member of COM can be taken for granted in the communication. Clearly, if C is a subset of D then validity relative to C implies validity relative to D. Ordinary entailment is then the special case where COM is empty, i.e. the strongest kind of entailment. (Note that COM is a set of interpretations, not an expression, so the question of how the shared content is expressed is here left open.) As an example, consider the set of URIs that a browser could utilize to locate a web page, consider the interpretation ADDR which maps each such uriref to the web page it locates according to the hypertext transfer protocol (and to the string "404error" if there is no such web page, say) and define HTTP-COM to be {ADDR}. Then entailment relative to HTTP-COM does not permit arbitrary re-interpretations of uri's starting with 'http://'. We will call such a 'shared' set of interpretations an interpretation core, or simply a core. The exact analysis of what constitutes the interpretation core for a community is beyond the scope of this document, but we will use the idea when extending the model theory to rdfs. This idea can be extended to describe assumptions shared between communities. If one community's core is S and the other is using entailment relative to T, then entailment relative to the intersection of S and T represents their 'common core' of agreed content. In the worst case this will be empty, and they will only have logical validity in common. (Actually, the worst case in practice is likely to be represented by the interpretation core of rdfs, see later sections.) The lemmas in section 6 above need to be stated more carefully when applied to relative entailment, since the conclusions of relative entailments can be derived in part from the core, in ways that are not easy to characterize. For example, it may be that the core interpretations impose a condition that requires two urirefs to denote the same resource, so that anything said using one would also be true if said using the other. Such an entailment would be relatively valid but might have no syntactic trace in the expressions themselves. Right now (7/27/01) I am not quite sure how to approach studying this aspect of relative validity. 9. rdfs interpretations (to be written) 10. reification and containers (to be written) 11. relative and absolute URIs. (to be written) ------------------------------- Appendix: proofs Lemma 1. Suppose E and E' are sets of triples. Then E entails E' iff E contains E'. Proof. If is trivial. For only if, suppose that (a b c) is a triple in E' which is not in E, and let I be an interpretation satisfying E. We will construct an interpretation I' which satisfies E but not E'. I' is like I except that I'EXT(I(b)) does not contain <I(a), I(c)>. Clearly I' does not satisfy E'. However, I(e)=I'(e) for all triples except (a b c), and I satisfies E, so I' satisfies E. QED. Lemma 2. Suppose E is a document. Then v(E) entails E. Proof (trivial). Lemma 3. (Proof to be written.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- (650)859 6569 w (650)494 3973 h (until September) phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Friday, 27 July 2001 17:49:21 UTC