Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer

Here's another way of thinking about the 'meaningless' claim.

For each of these properties (eg. rdfs:seeAlso), does the WG expect that there 
will likely be any RDF documents containing them that are true descriptions 
of the world?

Out MT approach of course allows for alice in wonderland interpretations that 
arrange a symbol->world mapping that'd make this possible. But we're concerned 
with the narrower case of descriptions of our world that we might hope to be 
true, useful etc in our lifetimes.

If we agree that no document containing these properties is likely to 
be a true description of the world, then the properties are useless. If not,
eg. if

<foaf:Person foaf:name="Dan Brickley">
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://rdfweb.org/people/danbri/rdfweb/danbri-foaf.rdf"/>
</foaf:Person>

...is true by virtue of (i) the meaning of the properties and classes used, 
(ii) the way the world is arranged., then we're OK. 

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 11 December 2002 08:30:04 UTC