Re: "meaningless terms" verbage for Primer

Sorry, I don't buy it.

I'm not concerned about what COULD be true in some closed environment,
but what IS true globally because there is explicit meaning that is
shared by all agents when interpeting the same terms, based on some
authoritative definition of that meaning.

It may very well be that for some system, some usage of a term may
be consistent and true, but if a given term has ambiguous semantics
such that inferences drawn in one context are true and inferences
drawn in another context are false, that's unacceptable.

I.e. in your system you may say that the value of rdfs:isDefinedBy
is an RDF Schema instance, but in my system, I might presume a broader
interpretation of the term, and hence for my data, your conclusion
that

IF
   aaa rdfs:isDefinedBy xxx .
THEN
   xxx rdf:type schemas:XMLSchema .

may in fact be false because you presume to much of rdfs:isDefinedBy
and the inference is not valid for all usage of that term!

Eh?

Patrick

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


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ext Dan Brickley" <danbri@w3.org>
To: "Frank Manola" <fmanola@mitre.org>
Cc: "Patrick Stickler" <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>; "w3c-rdfcore-wg" <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Sent: 11 December, 2002 15:30
Subject: 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 08:55:33 UTC