Re: new semantics initiative

patrick hayes wrote:
> 
> Greetings.
[snip] 

Pat--

Your message starts out like a letter from the Draft Board (fairly
appropriate under the circumstances, I suppose)!

Just for clarification (and maybe these are questions for the F2F):

a.  you are proposing that the new document using your new technique to
give a semantics for RDF should become a new RDF Core deliverable,
right?

b.  should this have the same normative status as the Model Theory
document (if not, how do you think we ought to refer to it?)

c.  what would be the status of the document describing the overall
technique?  Another RDF Core deliverable?  A WebONT deliverable?  A W3C
Note?  Something else?

--Frank

> 
> So, the proposal is to write two new documents and to slightly modify
> the RDF MT document. The modifications to the MT will amount to
> little more than a revised introduction which points out that the
> other two documents, taken together, amount to an alternative way of
> describing RDF semantics which is entirely formally equivalent to
> this one, but may have certain advantages for some developers. (There
> is also a related proposal to allow unasserted triples, in a way that
> overcomes the nonmonotonicity issue that the 'owl:Dark' proposal
> raised. Details of that will follow in later messages.)
> 
> The other two documents are (1) a description of the overall
> technique, including a description of the semantic language Lbase, a
> model theory for it and a general discussion of how to use it to
> provide semantics for other languages) , and (2) a document using
> this technique to give a semantics for RDF, and relating that to the
> RDF MT, proving that they are equivalent. Another way to think about
> this second document is that it provides an alternative way of
> describing the RDF MT which will be accessible to anyone with a
> background in logic, and which will also provide machine-checkable
> renderings of RDF meaning in a general-purpose framework which allows
> RDF formal content to be connected to, for example, DAML+OIL and OWL
> formal content in a uniform framework.
> 
> Guha and I are writing the first of these in any case, but we believe
> that it would be very useful and beneficial in the long run if the
> 'official' account of RDF also incorporated the second document,
> which we should have drafted in a few days. I would like therefore to
> place this on the agenda for the F2F. If there are any questions that
> people want answered before the F2F, feel free to email.
> 


-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road, MS A345   Bedford, MA 01730-1420
mailto:fmanola@mitre.org       voice: 781-271-8147   FAX: 781-271-8752

Received on Monday, 10 June 2002 14:02:23 UTC