Re: Comments on informal meaning of the RDFS vocabulary

From: "Jos De_Roo" <jos.deroo@agfa.com>
Subject: Re: Comments on informal meaning of the RDFS vocabulary
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 21:39:13 +0100

> 
> [sorry to reply again...]
> 
> > For example,
> >
> >          ex:Cretan rdf:subClassOf ex:Person .
> >          ex:Cretan rdfs:comment "All Cretans are liars" .
> >
> > would mean that the model theoretic consequences of
> >
> >          ex:John rdf:type ex:Cretan .
> >
> > would include that John is a liar.
> 
> Not when you write that as ex:John rdf:type ex:Liar.
> "All Cretans are liars" is just a plain literal

Not according to the social meaning view of RDF.  In this view of RDF, the
above sequence of characters affects the meaning of RDF(S) documents.  The
RDF Schema document makes the situation worse, by using the same kind of
wording to talk about the meaning of rdfs:comment values and the meaning of
rdf:type value.

>            A plain literal is either
>            * a Unicode string in Normal Form C
>            * a pair of such a string and a language tag
> 
> and is opaque to any likely RDF inference engine
> but *can* be carried by formal entailments

Oh, I agree with this wholeheartedly, but it has no bearing on the issue I
raised.

peter

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2003 15:58:46 UTC