Re: I'm Confused About RDF: A Subject is Not A Predicate, etc.

Ivon--

This may not cause you to change your mind about anything, but the fact 
is that you are not the only person that has complained about "parts of 
speech" in English descriptions of RDF examples not always being 
parallel with the "same-named" parts of the RDF expressions themselves. 
  We had several comments about that on earlier versions of the RDF 
Primer, so we changed the English descriptions around to make them 
parallel.  The result is that the English isn't as natural as it might 
be (we are talking here about making the English parallel to an 
artificial language, after all), but the subjects, objects, and 
predicates match up (or match up better anyway).  Check out the Primer 
at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/ and tell us if you still think it's 
confusing (this sort of plug being part of my job as Editor!).

--Frank


Ivon Fergus wrote:

> Thank you for the response. I plan to do much reading and little writing 
> on this topic, which I obviously know little about.  So, don't expect 
> any futher e-mails form me in the foreseeable future.
> 
> However, I deeply appreciate your attempts to help me. Perhaps you want 
> to indicate to Dr. Ogbuji that the example that you used in your 
> response is likely to be more clear to us old-timers trying to learn new 
> tricks.  On another note, your comments on my prior e-mail  show that I 
> lack education in post-Aristotelian logic. I concur; my only college 
> course even close to the field of modern mathematical logic 
> was Introduction to Modern Algebra, textbook by Neal H. McCoy, edition 
> of 1968, which I took in about 1970. Subsequently, I have read 
> extensively in a few books that were oriented to writing better computer 
> programs in Fortran in the 1970's and which discussed logic a bit. Since 
> then I have only dabbled in logic on the level of: All Greeks are liars 
> AND Socrates is a Greek; therefore, Socrates is a liar.   (A poor 
> example, but one which came to me quickly.)  Recently, however, my adult 
> son ! an! ! d I have begun working on some projects using XML, 
> etc.  so I'm reading a lot of relevant books and articles on this topic, 
> but Dr. Ogbuji's example in that article threw me completely off.
> 



-- 
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 Monday, 13 May 2002 18:16:22 UTC