Re: [closed] pfps-03

From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Subject: [closed] pfps-03
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 21:29:04 -0500

> Peter
> 
> re. your comment
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0092.html
> recorded as pfps-03:
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/20030123-issues/#pfps-03
> The WG has decided not to accept this comment;
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2003May/0199.html
> on the grounds that the appendix is informative (for a certain class 
> of readers), and the document states
> [[
> "The editor believes that both of these descriptions, and also the closure
> rules described in section 4, are all in exact correspondence, but only the
> directly described model theory in sections 1- 3 should be taken as
> normative."
> ]]
> The WG also noted that the 'axiomatic semantics' for DAML was widely 
> used and cited as a useful account of the semantics of that language, 
> and that the appendix in question serves a similar role.
> 
> Please respond to this message, CCing to www-rdf-comments@w3.org, to 
> say whether you find this response satisfactory.
> 
> Pat Hayes

I do not view this response as satisfactory in any way.  The sentence that
you quote is completely inadequate for providing any reasonable connection
between the RDF semantics and the translation to LBase.  I note that there
is an ``exact correspondence'' between the model theory and the LBase
translation, namely that induced by the translation, but, of course, this
does not indicate that the correspondence has any useful properties, such
as preserving satisfiability, validity, or entailment.  

I definitely agree that the situation here is similar to the situation with
respect to the DAML+OIL ``axiomatic semantics''.  There is no sharp
definition of the connection between the ``axiomatic semantics'' and the
model theory for DAML+OIL.  I view this as a serious deficiency in
DAML+OIL, one that would have had to be fixed before DAML+OIL was finished.
(This did not happen, as the further development of DAML+OIL was terminated
in favour of work on OWL.)

I view the current status of the translation to LBase as without purpose,
and thus unsupportable.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research
Lucent Technologies

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2003 08:59:44 UTC