Entailment

At 09:39 AM 11/21/02 -0600, Shelley Powers wrote:
>Again, though, if this document is for a general audience, then you may want
>to consider use of certain terms such as entailment. You give an example,
>and you talk about it, but you don't define it.

The first paragraph of:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-concepts-20021108/#section-Entailment

Was an attempt to get as close to defining entailment as I felt we could 
for an intended audience of system designers, information designers and 
programmers.  My view is that it is such an important concept for RDF that 
we cannot avoid saying something about it.

This is all very much under review in the current editing round.

>I as a programmer, not a semantician or a researcher, or someone who dabbles
>in AI and KM in my spare time will look at your section on entailment and
>say, "Do they mean equality? If so, why don't they say equality? Why are
>they using this term called 'entailment'?"

I, too, came to this from the perspective of a programmer and system 
designer, though I have taken some time to understand a little of the 
underlying maths.  I'm at a loss to understand how you can view the text as 
describing "equality", which entailment certainly is not.  Clearly this 
needs work to be sufficiently accessible -- I'm just not sure what.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Tuesday, 26 November 2002 13:38:01 UTC