- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 18:44:27 -0600
- To: Graham Klyne <GK@NineByNine.org>, jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
>At 01:22 PM 12/5/02 +0000, Brian McBride wrote: >>At 12:14 05/12/2002 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote: >> >>[...] >> >>>What the previous text does not say, and concerning which there >>>was a comment on the Concepts document, >> >>Reference please. What was the comment? > >It's logged, with links, at: > http://www.ninebynine.org/wip/DocIssues/RDF-Concepts/022-SocialMeaning.html > >The comment being: >[[ >Similarly, the tying of the meaning of a URI to the ill-specified >intent of some organization poses a giant bar to the deployment of >RDF. Under these circumstances how can any organization use an URI >that they do not own? The owning organization might, after all, >choose to change the meaning of any URI they own at any time. This >seems to me to be a bar to any communication between organizations >using RDF. >]] > >>> is that even though third-party vocabularies are generally >>>unconstrained by opthers who may use them, there may yet be some >>>that are sufficiently well-trusted for serious use. If you don't >>>want to go into legal territory, the final sentence might be pared >>>down to, say: >>> >>>[[ >>>For important documents this may mean that use of third-party >>>vocabulary is restricted to terms defined by reputable >>>organizations (e.g. recognized standards bodies), or that >>>otherwise have socially well-established meanings. >>>]] >> >>Right, that avoids the pitfall I mentioned, but I'm still wondering >>why a normative spec would be saying anything of the form "There >>might be ..." > >OK, let's try again: > >[[ >For important documents, the use of third-party vocabulary should be >restricted to terms defined by trustworthy parties (e.g. recognized >standards bodies or reputable organizations), or that otherwise have >socially well-established meanings. >]] > Seems to me that we losing the essential point here. Of course anyone CAN use any RDF they find to draw conclusions, and the conclusions will be valid consequences of the RDF they use. We shouldn't go on record as seeming to be saying that using RDF not authenticated by a socially reputable source is technically dangerous or illegal or somehow frowned upon, or that using RDF necessarily requires one to consult lawyers. All this comes from Tim wanting us to be clear that RDF, when asserted, really is asserted, is all. And that this means 'asserted' in the ordinary sense, not in some narrow technical sense: one uses RDF to actually say things . We might say something like this: --- Publishing some RDF should be understood as making a public assertion in the same sense that publishing some natural language makes an assertion, and the full meaning of this assertion should be understood as encompassing all the usual social senses of meaning in the usual way that this term might be understood to apply to any other publication of a definition, claim, assertion of fact or statement of opinion in any other medium; except that in the case of RDF, these notions of meaning should be understood to carry over to any formal consequences of the published RDF which can be validly inferred from the published RDF by using correct RDF reasoning. The intended meaning conveyed by publishing some RDF in this sense may be more than is captured by the formal semantics - it may for example be conveyed partially by English comments or other non-machine-readable forms of expression in the original document - but it is required to be an extension or strengthening of the formal meaning, and hence to be preserved under valid formal inference processes. When RDF published by several different sources is put together, the combined assertions may have valid entailments whose full meaning can be determined only by examining the intended meanings of all of the sources, and in such cases the question of which source or sources are responsible for the veracity of the conclusion may be complex, and require some detailed analysis. In extreme cases this could be subject to legal or contractual interpretation. For example, [[insert clown example and discussion here.]] While we anticipate that RDF content will be used primarily for less contentious forms of expression, the general point remains that users are ultimately responsible for checking that the meanings of the urirefs in any RDF they publish correspond to the intended meanings of such 'third-part' urirefs as specified in the originating documents, since readers of their RDF are free to combine it with RDF published by others which also use those same urirefs, and to draw any formally valid conclusions. --- I think this style - a kind of vague general warning that there is a real issue here, but short of an outright MUST or SHOULD - is about the right one to adopt. Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes s.pam@ai.uwf.edu for spam
Received on Thursday, 5 December 2002 19:44:35 UTC