Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer

[Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com]


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ext Frank Manola" <fmanola@mitre.org>
To: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
Cc: "ext Jan Grant" <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>; "w3c-rdfcore-wg" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Sent: 10 December, 2002 18:29
Subject: Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer


> 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?
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> "Consistent machine interpretation" sure.  But it seems to me you're 
> going beyond that, to a requirement for a machine-interpretable 
> definition as the basis for all this consistent machine interpretation. 
>     As I said in an earlier message, that's something we want to move 
> toward, but I don't think we can throw out the older approaches quite 
> yet, as problematic as they may be (how do people write TCP/IP software, 
> for example?)
> 
> --Frank

No, I'm simply talking about consistency in the interpretation of
the terms, not that the definition of the terms is machine
interpretable also. I.e. foo:blarg always means the same thing and
it is clear (somewhere, even if only in prose for humans) what it
means and all applications intepret it the same way.

At present, the terms identified in my earlier post do not have
such consistent interpretation because they have no actual
definition of their meaning and thus ambiguity and conflicts are
possible.

If we're not going to give them meaning, fine, but let's be clear
and up-front about it so that (less technical) users are not given
the impression that they actually do have defined meaning, which
IMO their use in examples, in any of the RDF documents, suggest.

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2002 00:53:30 UTC