Re: Monotony

pat hayes wrote:

>> Frank Manola wrote:
>>
>>> More to your
>>> original point, it seems to me what you want is the ability to control
>>> or specify when you have monotonicity and when you don't.  Kind of like
>>> a database transaction mechanism.
>>
>> Exactly!   Whatever a  *logical* RDF graph is, it is certainly is a 
>> document or a cluster of documents - what it is *not* is the whole 
>> blody semantic web.  Yet we seem not to have any convention for RDF 
>> authors to state that simple fact about their RDF documents and 
>> clusters of documents.  But there are many ways that this can be 
>> implemented without breaking into any new specifications.  Well we 
>> might need to define some new properties, but nothing really major or 
>> tramatic.
>
>
> If we have ways of stating the boundaries of 
> documents/databases/whatever, and of referring to them (perhaps 
> implicitly) and saying explicitly that something follows from this 
> bounded thingie alone, then we could say a lot of things that we are 
> unable to say right now. 

Excuse me, where is it written that we cannot say things about these 
 boundries?   If I publish a RDF document on the web, it certainly has a 
 URI,  and I certainly can say things about that resource (assumed here 
 to be the graph) that has that name.   Why can I not say in RDF that 
 this document (or cluster of ducments) either does (or does not) have 
the Closed World Assumption ?

You may find 
   "Readings about the question: It is said that reasoning on
    the semantic web must be monotonic.  Why is this so,
    when human reasoning, which seems to have served us
    well, is nonmonotonic? "
 somewhat amusing.

http://robustai.net/papers/Monotonic_Reasoning_on_the_Semantic_Web.html

Seth Russell

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 2002 11:20:40 UTC