S3 or not S3

Sergey:
> <SUG3>: the interpretation of each literal symbol is fixed
>        and is determined by its textual contents.

I am against.

I tend to agree with Peter, this just shifts the problem.

Let's think about it in terms of monotonicity.

In what I understand as Pat's approach, if I have a single triple

<foo> <bar> "lit" .

and no other information,
then "lit" appears to be a string.

Somehow or other, I add typing information, and we have a non-monotonic
change in our understanding of "lit", in that it is now interpreted as a
particular typed value whose print-string is "lit".

If we are deeply committed to non-monotonicity we do a little somersault and
say that the triple by itself has an object of unknown type whose
print-string is "lit". Then adding the type information hasn't involve any
change, just an augmentation of our knowledge!

This is parallel in Sergey's model:
The triple
<foo> <bar> _:bn .

represents the existence of something that is the bar of foo. But we don't
know its type or value. Adding another triple

_:bn <type> "lit" .

tells us both the type and value.
That this is just as much a somersault as before is shown by Peter's
suggestion of there being a second (conflicting) type triple

_:bn <type2> "lit2" .

The contradiction arrived at is a sympton of an underlying non-monotonicity
I think.

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 2 November 2001 09:32:04 UTC