Re: Dublin Core, the Primer and the Model Theory

On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 04:32, Jeremy Carroll wrote:
[...]
> The current model theory also mandates the following 
> entailment:
> 
> Premise:
>  <eg:doc1> <dc:creator> "John Smith" .
>  <eg:doc2> <dc:creator> "John Smith" .
> Conclusion:
>  <eg:doc1> <dc:creator> _:blank .
>  <eg:doc2> <dc:creator> _:blank .
> 
> All Dublin Core users would recognise that it is not
> always true that the premise entail that the two documents
> have the same author i.e. they would recognise that there 
> might be two Johns.

The way I see it, dc:creator relates a work to
either its creator or a name for its creator.
So the conclusion just says that the two works
have either the same creator or have creators with
the same name.

I'd rather the dublin core folks didn't use
RDF this way, but they did choose to, and
I'm pretty sure they were made aware of
this sort of nonsense when they made the choice.


> The model theory describes necessary truth (not optional 
> or probable truth), which all uses of all RDF documents
> must follow. Given a reading of the conclusion
> as the two documents have the same author then, 
> according to the april model theory
> the Dublin Core users are simply wrong in this case.

I don't think they're wrong; maybe misguided.

> So, in practice, we have decided to deprecate the single most 
> common RDF triple
>   <uri>  <dc:creator> "string" .
> 
> 
> This seems a very peculiar decision of any standardization 
> committee, to deprecate its single greatest use case. If that 
> is indeed our decision it needs to be both highlighted and 
> respected in the primer.

yes, I'd rather see examples ala
	<http://...> dc:creator _:somebody.
	_:somebody ex:name "Bob".

If this goes on our issues list, please call it
"things versus their names".


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 16 May 2002 09:50:27 UTC