- From: Bill de hÓra <dehora@eircom.net>
- Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 23:48:25 -0000
- To: <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > -----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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.0.4 iQA/AwUBPH1wGOaWiFwg2CH4EQKJmQCeMMW6qx1UwAorPitFJx/5/8tHcywAoKi6 R3Axbm9y8vEMve/sRYH2GT/T =a9WN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2002 18:53:38 UTC