Re: use/mention and reification

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Dan Brickley wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Jan Grant wrote:
>
> > On 18 Jan 2002, Dan Connolly wrote:
> >
> > > As I said in today's telcon, I think
> > > the rdf:subject of "Mary likes Bob"
> > > should be a word that starts with M,
> > > not a female person.
> > >
> > > I sent the gory details to rdf-logic
> > > a while ago:
> > >
> > > Message-ID: <3B0FEF6A.BE6740CC@w3.org>
> > > Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 13:01:14 -0500
> > > From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
> > > To: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
> > > CC: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
> > > Subject: use/mention and reification: rdf:predicate/subject/object [was:
> > > RDF   Abstract Syntax...]
> > > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/2001May/0359.html
> >
> > I still don't understand why you can't pronounce
> >
> > 	<sentence> <rdf:Subject> <mary> .
> >
> > as "the sentence has a subject whose referent is (the person) Mary" -
> > ie, if you just change your intuition about what rdf:Subject "means"
> > does this go away?
>
> Not really. For one, this approach forces the quoting content to share
> worldview with the quoted content about whether the terms used denote. If
> we assume that all URIs denote, and that the term->world mapping is
> static, maybe this isn't a problem. But I'm not sure we've committed to
> those claims yet.

Isn't the point of having delegatable namespace control to preserve the
"U" in "URI"? If you take this view then all arguments for anonymous
(nodes|resources) vanish (again), because you can just use

	http://thing.com/1
	http://thing.com/2

etc. in your document and claim that the intended interpretation differs
on a document-by-document basis.



-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
I shave with Occam's Razor.

Received on Monday, 21 January 2002 10:28:43 UTC