Re: "RDF processor"? "understand"??? [was: Agenda for RDFCore WG Telecon 2002-08-25]

On 23 Aug 2002, Dan Connolly wrote:

>
> On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 10:41, bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > 13: Meaning of rdf:type and relationship between RDF and RDFS
> > (a) must any RDF processor
>
> what's an 'RDF processor'?


I don't know. I use 'grep' to search my RDF stash.

> We're defining a language, not a software module, right?

This is important to note...

> The first occurence of the term in
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/
> is in the discussion of issues. It's not used anywhere
> in the spec. (Whew!)
>
> It doesn't occur at all in
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/
>
> (whew!)

I've avoided 'processor' in RDFS, where we note that...
[[
For example, while an RDF schema can assert that an author property is
used to indicate resources that are members of the class Person, it does
not say whether or how an application should act in processing that class
information. Different applications will use this information in different
ways. For example, a data checking tools might use this to help discover
errors in some dataset, an interactive editor might suggest appropriate
values, and a reasoning application might use it to infer additional
information from instance data.
]]

>
> > understand
>
> What does 'understand' mean?

[[
The goal of this activity, and of RDF specifically, is to produce a
language for the exchange of machine-understandable information using the
Web.
]] RDFS Status section

also

[[
Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are becoming a
high priority for many communities.
]]


I'd be happy if we managed to avoid the word, but it's scattered around
quite widely. There may also be aspects of the meaning of classes and
properties not captured in our current formalisation; hence the desire to
appeal to 'innate' knowledge within some processor.

Dan

> You can ask (and expect an answer from our specs)
> whether one RDF document simply entails another, or whether
> it rdfs-entails another. But our specs don't speak
> of 'RDF processors', let alone 'understand'.
>
> > the object of an rdf:type property as being an rdfs:Class (and hence understand what an rdfs:Class is)?
> >
> > (b) must an RDF processor that understands what an rdfs:Class is also
> > understand the rest of the RDFS vocabulary?
> >
> >
> > See:
> >   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Aug/0173.html
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 23 August 2002 09:52:11 UTC