- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 12:25:05 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- cc: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>, Michael Luck <mml@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, Nick Jennings <nrj@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, <ora.lassila@nokia.com>, <www-archive@w3.org>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, <gerald@w3.org>
[snip] Hi folks, I stumbled across this thread on www-archive (an archival rather than discussion list :) but since I've longstanding interest in both RDF and the 'symbol grounding' debate, I can't resist jumping in. Steven, I share your concern that some folk are using the word 'meaning' in an over-generous sense, and that much of what we've done with RDF and OWL has been in the world of abstract syntactic structures. The piece of the puzzle that connects those to society and human practice is far from clear, at this stage. URIs are important, but don't provide the entire story. We claim that RDF has propositional content, but don't (yet? ever?) enumerate the factors relevant to fixing (and discovering) that content. Given an infinitely well funded scientist and an RDF document, how would s/he set about working out what the content of the document was, and whether it was true? (for related grumblings re role of model theories, see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2002Aug/0175.html). The closest we get to this topic in the RDF specs is a paragraph in our most recent working draft, http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/#section-Social [[ RDF/XML documents, i.e. encodings of RDF graphs, can be used to make representations of claims or assertions about the 'real' world. RDF graphs may be asserted to be true, and such an assertion should be understood to carry the same social import and responsibilities as an assertion in any other format. A combination of social (e.g. legal) and technical machinery (protocols, file formats, publication frameworks) provide the contexts that fix the intended meanings of the vocabulary of some piece of RDF, and which distinguish assertions from other uses (e.g. citations, denals or illustrations). ]] Nailing down more details of this 'combination of social and technical machinery' will be tricky (to put it mildly), but is critical if we want RDF documents to be the sort of thing people can wave around in court. Or, more generally, that can be used as records of obligations and commitments... Sorry to jump in. Maybe we could move this thread to www-rdf-interest@w3.org? Dan -- mailto:danbri@w3.org http://www.w3.org/People/DanBri/
Received on Wednesday, 11 September 2002 12:25:13 UTC