- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 17:02:05 -0500
- To: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
>On 2002-04-16 20:03, "ext Brian McBride" <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com> wrote: > >> At 16:33 15/04/2002 -0400, Pat Hayes wrote: >> [...] >> >>> I don't want to be a party-pooper, but I honestly feel that having an MT >>> and sticking to it is one way to get past this kind of half-formalized >>> (and rather confusing) kind of discussion. I do not know what these >>> 'levels' are supposed to be, or how to recognize them, or how to evaluate >>> talk about them, etc. etc. . Why not stick to the syntax and the MT, and >>> just talk about that? Then everything is clear. What an application wants >>> to do with an RDF graph is up to it, not up to us. All we can do is to >>> provide application writers with a gold standard for meanings, and leave >>> other 'layers' to them. >> >> I agree. > >That's a pity, because there are lots of users of RDF who can't >read or understand the MT. So... > >There are many different kinds of "customers" who will read the >RDF Datatyping specification, and we need to be sure that it is >clear and approachable -- and ultimately *usable* -- to them all. Agreed, but that is a matter of giving a good tutorial exposition. I think that can be done without mis-stating what the MT says. >The MT, IMO, stops short of the line. It gets 95% there and fails >to actually say how to get to the finish. It fails to capture >the ultimate "why" of the idioms. Patrick, you want to ALTER the MT, clearly. The trouble with your position, however, is that the place you want to get to, that last 5%, is a place we have already surveyed, and we found problems with it. Some of our customers definitely do not want to be located there. They WANT to be able to be sloppy about datatype values, mix talk of strings with talk of integers, etc., and still they want to invoke lexical form checking using datatypes. They see RDF not as an ur-Java, or a simple data modelling language, but more like a kind of rather floppy semantic tagging language for attaching bits of half-formalized content to chunks of text. We need to be able to leave these sloppy Dublin guys enough flexibility to do their thing without having their RDF break. If we insist on the kind of tight, clear, sharp datatyping that is close to your (and my own) heart, where lexical forms *must* indicate values, then we are making RDF unusable by about half our user base. >If you want the MT to be the only level addressed in the RDF >Datatyping specification, then could we consider giving datatyped >literal pairings a formal definition in the MT. They need no >explicit denotation in the graph, no more so than the datatype >mappings do. They only need definition. Eh? > I don't see how this will help, or even what it really means. The current MT is completely unambiguous, and I don't think it would be easy to add anything to it without breaking it somewhere. But chiefly, there seems to be no NEED for this. The various idioms provide all the precision (or lack of it) that anyone seems to need, as far as I can see. If you want to talk about values, you can using datatype properties or dlex. If you want to insist on lexical form checking, you can do that. If you want to be sloppy, you can be; or you can state your rdfs:ranges as exactly as you want them to be if precision is close to your heart. Whatever makes you happy. Whats wrong with that? >Patrick > >-- > >Patrick Stickler Phone: +358 50 483 9453 >Senior Research Scientist Fax: +358 7180 35409 >Nokia Research Center Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Wednesday, 17 April 2002 18:02:09 UTC