Re: [issue needed] Re: RDFCore last call WD's: Two comments on the RDF documents

Frank,

All of your suggestions sound reasonable to me.  I'm satisfied
that the issues are being covered.

Thanks, Bob

At 10:04 AM 2/28/2003 -0500, Frank Manola wrote:
>[Brian--see comment about the need for WG agreement at the end;  as a 
>result, perhaps this requires an issue]
>
>Bob--
>
>Thanks for the reply.  Once again this has been very helpful.  OK, here's 
>my idea for what needs to be done to the Primer reification section, 
>following your suggestions:
>
>1.  The reificaton section would have an outline something like this:
>
>*  RDF provides a vocabulary to describe RDF statements (for making 
>"statements about statements")
>
>*  this is intended to support statements describing the *provenance* of 
>other statements (e.g., who wrote them, when they were written, and so on).
>
>*  here is how you would use this vocabulary to describe provenance [example].
>
>*  notice that in order to provide this description, you need to have a 
>URIref that identifies the actual statement (or graph) you are talking 
>about.  RDF does not provide a built-in way of generating such URIrefs, or 
>of indicating how URIrefs are to be associated with individual statements 
>or graphs, any more than it provides a built-in way of generating URIrefs 
>for the tents we described in Section 3, or of associating URIrefs with 
>specific tents.  As in those examples, the mechanisms for associating 
>specific URIrefs with specific resources (statements in this case) are 
>outside of RDF.
>
>2.  At the end of the reification section, I could add a *brief* paragraph 
>on propositional attitudes going something like this:
>
>*  some of the statements about statements people might want to make are 
>things like "Lois believes that Superman is strong", or "Phil thinks that 
>George is a clown".  These statements describe what are called 
>"propositional attitudes";  e.g. in the first example, the attitude Lois 
>takes (that she believes it) to the proposition that "Superman is strong".
>
>*  it is straightforward to *syntatically* represent such statements using 
>the reification vocabulary (assuming a URIref has been assigned to the 
>appropriate statement) using the technique already described [example]
>
>*  However, consistently processing statements involving propositional 
>attributes is known to be extremely complicated [and involves the 
>potential for generating apparent contradictions;  cite references].  So 
>anyone using RDF for such purposes needs to be extremely careful, and be 
>aware of the issues described in the references.
>
>Does this sound reasonable?  If so, I think making these changes involves 
>more than "editorial discretion", so I'd like Working Group agreement that 
>these changes are OK.
>
>--Frank
>
>
>
>--
>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
>

Robert MacGregor
Project Leader
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292
macgregor@isi.edu
Phone: 310/448-8423, Fax: 310/822-6592
Mobile: 310/251-8488

Received on Friday, 28 February 2003 19:43:39 UTC