RE: Named graphs etc

A few comments ...

> >
> >Publication of a graph, or an RDF/XML instance, should not equate to
> >assertion.
>
> I don't think that follows. And in any case, its too late to try to
> change this now, seems to me.


Some published RDF/XML docs are asserted, some are not (e.g. WG test cases).
We dropped the sections of RDF Concepts that presumed that
publishing=asserting, partly because there was no consensus.



> Asserting isn't a kind of logical sentence, it's a speech act. It
> stands outside the logical semantics.

English works both to carry content and speech acts, I think the suggestion
is that RDF can carry its own speech act status, and the bootstrapping is in
the user perceptions (the trust layer).

> Well, how about this. Publication is assertion: but what gets
> asserted depends on the publication mode, which is set by an optional
> 'publishMode' property in the RDF XML element tag. If it isnt set,
> then the graph is asserted by the publication: the default case. If
> the mode="quote" then what is asserted by the publication is simply
> that the graph exists and has the name that it has, ie this
> publication is like saying
>
> here is the graph named "ex:foo" : "......"
>
> without asserting the graph itself. This still allows other people to
> import it if they want to assert it.
> The combination of a publication with mode="quote" and then having
> another asserted graph which just imports he first graph is almost
> exactly like publishing the graph plain.
>
> This mechanism is obviously expandable by allowing other values for
> that property, eg maybe someone wants to say publishMode="deny" or
> publishMode="archaic". It even allows for URIs in there pointing to
> hypothetical future ontologies of publication mode types, whatever.
> And it doesn't require any modification to RDF or to OWL, and its
> uniform across media types.
>

I was initially taking this point of view, but it is just more data, and
apart from the bootstrapping problem, putting it all in RDF does seem more
minimalist.

Things can be bootstrapped from English ...

The fact that the WG Tests are not asserted is found in the Test Cases
Recommendations (not that they say so explicitly).

Jeremy

Received on Tuesday, 9 March 2004 11:44:28 UTC