Re: Outstanding Issues - an RDF statement is an assertion

>On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Graham Klyne wrote:
>
>>  Putting it in the MT is a possibility, but it's not really a semantic
>>  comment, as such, but a social comment ("RDF is intended to achieve
>>  _this_").  Having formal semantics is (part of) how we achieve the goal in
>>  question.
>
>The Model Theory document seems the best home for it, to me, although this
>isn't part of the MT as such. It isn't too late to rename that document,
>though I don't want to start a thread on that possibility right now. 'RDF
>Fomalisation' or somesuch maybe.
>
>I don't see this topic as a social comment, although there is an
>aspirational aspect. The point is that we believe RDF documents make
>claims about the world, that we believe it makes sense to speak of an RDF
>document being 'true' or 'false'. This then connects us with machinery
>presented in the MT document, which tells us about truth-preserving
>operations on RDF data.

This would also be a good place to say clearly some of the things 
that RDFS *isn't*, eg it doesn't DEFINE a vocabulary, it doesn't in 
itself provide NORMATIVE constraints on intended meanings (though 
y'all could use it for that as long as y'all agreed to obey some 
extra rules), etc. .

BTW, the webont group is wrestling with how to tell the world this 
basic stuff right now as well, maybe we could get together with them 
on writing a master document, or at least liaise to make sure our 
terminology is mutually consistent. See 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Feb/0068.html & 
subsequent thread.

>(Whether there any cases where a syntatically wellformed RDF/XML document
>is neither true nor false, but (something like) meaningless may be worth
>some attention (in Primer, MT?). Bogus URIs, for example. Probably a
>rathole, forget I mentioned it.)

Definitily a rathole, but might be worth putting up a warning flag.

Pat
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Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2002 15:21:12 UTC