Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Patrick Stickler wrote:

>
>
> [Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "ext Jan Grant" <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
> To: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
> Cc: "fmanola" <fmanola@mitre.org>; "w3c-rdfcore-wg" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
> Sent: 10 December, 2002 12:38
> Subject: Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer
>
>
> > On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Patrick Stickler wrote:
> >
> > > If there is no machine interpretable interpretation, then IMO
> > > there is no interpretation whatsoever. Eh?
> >
> > This seems to be a persuasive argument for dropping language tags.
>
> I don't follow. Though the language tags do not affect the
> denotation of typed literals, they have consistent and unambiguous
> interpretation by machines (even if that interpretation is
> disjuct from the datatyping interpretation of the typed literal.
>
> On the other hand, if some term has no consistent machine
> interpretation, in any way, at any level, then it is useless
> as part of a solution for the global interchange of knowledge
> for which RDF is supposed to serve as a foundational component.
>
> No?

I'm sorry, I thought you were saying that entailments were the only way
to give machine "meaning" to RDF; the conter-position is that various
bits of RDF have a meaning on some other level (eg, use for
documentation in the cases of comment). That is, "meaning" as people
generally understand the term, not as in, rules in the semantics
document.

I'm still not convinced that "10"@en^^xsd:integer and
"10"@fr^^xsd:integer would get treated the same way by all application
programmers; there may be a consistent machine interpretation of
these, but if that's because there's only one implementation that deals
with these at the moment then I don't see that as being a particularly
valid argument :-)





-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
Usenet: The separation of content AND presentation - simultaneously.

Received on Tuesday, 10 December 2002 06:54:24 UTC