Semantics Spanner

On another list, it has been claimed that the current RDF MT editors draft has 
non-monotonic datatyping.
If this is the case then it should be fixed.

I will try and review this claim before the telecon today, I suggest others 
might like to as well.

The claim is that when foo is not a supported datatype then

foo rdf:type rdfs:Datatype .

is inconsistent, and hence entails everything.

Thus, supporting an additional datatype foo, negates previously valid 
entailments, and hence causes a datatyped system to layer non-monotonically 
on top of a datatyped system.

I personally find this a credible critique that should be taken seriously.
We may need to leave open any semantics issues affected :( 

The (cryptic) examples given in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003May/0276.html

concern the minimal datatype system consisting of only rdf:XMLLiteral, and so 
xsd:int plays the role of foo above.

I note that this comment is based on the shadow space draft rather than Pat's 
master copy - we may hope that magic has happened.

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 16 May 2003 05:19:44 UTC