RE: possible way out of maze? [was: Re: xml:lang [was Re: Outstanding Issues ]]

 
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@ai.uwf.edu] 
>
> Let me suggest a possible way out of this maze. Its the kind of
> thing  that a mathematician would say, so maybe it won't be
> acceptable, but  here goes.
> 
> Literals are strings. However, an app might decide that what
> counts  as the 'same' string for inference purposes might be 
> language-sensitive, so that the UK-spelling string "What colour
> is  it?" might be allowed to match, ie to be the 'same as' the 
> US-spelling string "What color is it?". Such language-sensitive 
> matching would require an application which used it to maintain 
> language tags associated with literals, but those tage are
> invisible  to RDF, and are not considered to be part of the RDF
> graph syntax. If  an RDF application uses language-sensitive
> matching then it will be  able to draw more conclusions than one
> which does not, for example  
> 
> ex:Nigel  ex:believes "color is red" .
> ex:BillyBob ex:believes "color is red" .
> 
> might have the consequence
> 
> ex:Nigel  ex:believes _:x .
> ex:BillyBob ex:believes _:x.
> 
> with language-sensitive stringmatching, but would not if simple 
> string matching were used.
> 
> IN mathematical terms, a literal is in general an equivalence
> class  of strings, but the criteria that determine equivalence
> are under the  RDF hood. And if there isnt anything under the
> hood, then every class  just has a single string in it.
> 
> This would I think allow Brian to preserve his code with a clear 
> conscience, but also would avoid the issues that arise from
> saying  that languages were anything like properties. (?)
 
Sure. But language tags are something like properties. The only
issue here is that RDF is being obstinate and pretends they're not.

I observe this will just boil down to a truth table implemented in
code somewhere, not unlike the one Jeremy and I knocked together
last year, or if we're being good engineers, some kind of data
directed dispatch. And we still haven't got a clue as to how
applications are supposed to know what other applications are doing
or inferring with these un-properties. I thought we were supposed
to use RDF to get this kind of opacity out of code.

Bill de hÓra

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Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2002 18:53:38 UTC