Re: On Consensus

Brian McBride wrote:

>  
> A 6-5 vote with Jos missing and later dissenting hardly represents 
> consensus.


Not to mention the hearty enthusiasm with which some of those votes were 
cast!


> 
> I believe we have to try again to find a consensus.  I am therefore 
> suggesting that we put our thinking caps back on, better understand the 
> real concerns related to this issue and see if we can find a solution 
> that can attract broader support than we have seen so far.
> 


I'd like to try casting this issue in terms of equality/identity 
operations rather than entailments for a bit.  It seems to me 
(corrections welcome) the basic issue is that current RDF 
implementations interpret the literal equality operation as string 
matching, and we'd like to "grandfather" that, so that existing 
implementations can continue to implement that operation, and existing 
applications that depend on that interpretation can continue to work (I 
don't believe RDF M&S actually defined an equality operation;  this is 
just the way RDF implementations worked).  At the same time, we'd like, 
in conjunction with the datatyping facility, to have RDF implementations 
support "value equality" based on datatypes (so age 10 isn't the same as 
movie-title 10 according to value equality).  Even with value equality, 
string equality still seems a reasonable (and useful) operation to 
support (you can think of it as a "cast to string" if you want).  So why 
can't we have both?  That is, define as part of the datatyping facility 
something like a "value equality" operation and require people to 
indicate which equality operation they are using.  We ought to be able 
to cast this idea in terms of entailments for formal definition purposes.

--Frank



-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road, MS A345   Bedford, MA 01730-1420
mailto:fmanola@mitre.org       voice: 781-271-8147   FAX: 781-271-875

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 08:46:08 UTC