- From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 14:58:58 +0100 (BST)
- To: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- cc: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>, w3c-rdfcore-wg <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Brian McBride wrote:
> Pat,
>
> - sans chapeau
>
> I'd like to suggest that ALT does need special treatment in the model theory.
>
> At the beginning of M&S 3.1 it says:
>
> Alternative A list of resources or literals that represent alternatives
> for the (single) value of a property. Alternative might be
> used to provide alternative language translations for the
> title of a work, or to provide a list of Internet mirror
> sites at which a resource might be found. An application
> using a property whose value is an Alternative collection
> is aware that it can choose any one of the items in the list
> as appropriate
>
> If a resource has two titles, one in French and the other in English, then
> both are the titles of the work, i.e. conjunctive. An application however,
> may choose to display only one.
>
> If software can be downloaded from several mirror sites, then that software
> can be downloaded from all them, not just one of them, i.e. again conjunctive.
> The idea that this example meant to express the idea that one of these sites
> has the software, you can go try them to figure out which one seems a little
> far fetched.
>
> I suggest DanC is right here; the use of ALT is a hint to an application
> about how it might process this information.
While I have held, in principle, what I'd characterise as DanC's opinion
here (or the more extreme version: "alt is totally broken") - that is,
that an app can infer what it likes, an alt-unaware MT is going to
produce an odd semantics for something like
<doc1> <dc:creator> _:a .
_:a <rdf:type> <rdf:Alt> .
_:a <rdf:_1> <jan> .
_:a <rdf:_2> <dan> .
("doc1 was written by either jan or dan") - I don't see how you can
ignore alt in the MT and get this interpretation, no matter how you go
about it.
--
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
If it's broken really badly - don't fix it either.
Received on Monday, 3 September 2001 10:00:39 UTC