Issue #pfps-14 Social Meaning

Peter,

Your endorsement of this comment has been recorded at:

   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/20030123-issues/#pfps-14

RDFCore will respond in due course.

Brian


At 11:24 17/02/2003 +0000, Peter Crowther wrote:

> > From: Jeremy Carroll [mailto:jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com]
> > To: Jeremy Carroll; www-webont-wg@w3.org
>[...]
> > Assuming this WG is not going to endorse Peter's comment
> > [[1]]
>
>I'd endorse that personally and, as the AC rep for Network Inference,
>would be likely to vote against RDF simply because of this flaw.  Social
>meaning is not something that a spec can influence, or should attempt to
>influence; that is up to the courts and the governments of our existing
>legal structures, not to W3C.  I think it is hubris to believe anything
>else, and that kismet will swiftly follow due to the non-deployment of
>RDF.  Certainly I would recommend to my colleagues, business partners
>and clients that they remove all existing use of RDF from their
>organisations forthwith, as its legal status was insufficiently clear as
>a consequence of the new standard.  This would include other W3C
>standards that use RDF, such as RSS --- who knows what 'social meaning'
>might be carried by an RSS feed?
>
>OWL is another matter, but I would recommend that the XML encoding of
>OWL be used rather than the RDF encoding.
>
>Could I also point to my comment [2] on www-webont-wg about translators
>and the lack of clear responsibility for the social meaning of the
>translated RDF?  Reproduced below:
>
>-- snip --
>
>Here's another interesting one, by the way, more related to
>rdfms-assertion; I'm not sure what to make of this.  Consider a variant
>of the UMD DAML+OIL to OWL translator that takes DAML+OIL and/or KRSS as
>input and that produces OWL[/RDF] output.  Consider further that it is
>accessible via a HTTP GET and can translate DAML+OIL and KRSS that it
>can retrieve by URL - so there is a unique URL for its OWL translation
>of some non-OWL (and, indeed, non-RDF) input.  Consider further that
>some public-spirited soul makes this available as a service on their Web
>site.  Who is responsible for the 'social meaning' of the produced (and
>effectively published) OWL?  The author of the original document,
>despite the fact that they wrote in a formalism that didn't have this
>burden?  The operator of the translation service, despite the fact that
>they have no control over the data on which it is used?
>
>-- snip --
>
>
>My own proposal would be to state that publishers of RDF SHOULD state
>the legal framework under which they are publishing that RDF, and that
>it is up to consumers of that RDF to determine whether they then want to
>use it.  This may push the problem of an agent trying to determine
>whether it should trust content from the agent being required to
>understand the free text (in any language) inside each comment to the
>agent being required to understand the legal ramifications of a single
>statement of framework (in any language).
>
>[1]
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-comments/2003JanMar/0192.htm
>l
>
>[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2003Jan/0310.html

Received on Saturday, 1 March 2003 05:53:07 UTC