- From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 17:10:02 +0100 (BST)
- To: patrick hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- cc: fmanola@mitre.org, w3c-rdfcore-wg <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, patrick hayes wrote: > > >Pat-- > > > >How about some suggestions for what we ought to mean by "define"? > > Perhaps I didn't make my rhetorical point clear enough. I don't think > it has any meaning. What I would like to say about "isDefinedBy" is > something like "this is completely meaningless, but if it makes you > feel good, you can use it to point to something." Which, of course, > would make one wonder just why we even have "isDefinedBy" in the > language at all. Yes, exactly. > > I'm willing to be disabused. If someone in the WG thinks it does mean > something, then by all means explain what that is, preferably with a > test case involving an entailment. But saying, in essence, " > 'isDefinedBy' means is defined by" , doesn't actually tell the reader > (or me) anything. The discussion after-hours seemed to be less concerned with model-theoretic semantics (which don't deal with this at all, and rightly so) but with application-level and process-level use cases: namely, building RDF "management" applications for dealing with sets of schema elements (or "vocabularies", I think the term was used). Danbri says, for a term (property, class, etc) there is someone who "owns" or produced the definition for it, so he wants this to act as a pointer to something that gives a handle onto that. There may also be machine-processable uses where the thing on the sharp end of iDB is dereferenced to pull back schema element definitions. These seem to be two loosely-related notions, both of which have a plausible application-level story. (A more complex use case to do with schema and subschema management where different properties of schema elements are managed in different places was raised in the after-hours talk but I'll leave that to the person who raised it to elaborate.) Basically, as you might expect from a loaded term like "defined", people still seem to have a few notions as to what it means - most of which are at the application level, not at the level of individual triples or the MT. -- 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 User interface? I hardly know 'er!
Received on Friday, 14 June 2002 12:11:17 UTC