RE: Statements/Stating: a proposition

Hi Bill,

> 
> : Consider a statement S which occurs in two documents,
> : http://foo and http://bar.
> :
> : Let RS be a reified statement representing both S and
> : its occurrence in http://foo.  Thus:
> :
> :    (occursIn, RS, http://foo)
> :
> : is true.
> 
> You opener is ambiguous. When you say "both S and its occurence",
> does "its" refer to S or RS?

S

> If S then your ensuing statement might
> be true iff RS is present with S in http://foo.

I don't see why.

> If RS is present then
> the ensuing statement is true. By "present" I mean
> syntactically/literally present.
> 
> More ambiguity. What are the intended semantics of "occursIn" wrt to
> a model of a statement? Does it mean syntactically/literally present,
> or, does it mean can be inferred by the presence of the statement
> being modelled, or, does it mean something else?
> 
> Also, I'm not altogether sure that RS can represent both S and its
> occurence.

Neither am I.  The message you are responding to was an attempt
to explain why I don't think it works.

> Again this is ambiguous. Do you mean an occurence of S
> within http://foo, or do you mean that RS stands for the statement S
> and any occurence/instance of S?

The text I wrote does say "and its occurrence in http://foo".  Does
that not distinguish it from "any occurrence/instance of S"?

> 
> A while back I posted a request that the RDFm clean up its language
> wrt to refication in future versions, and I believe you were the only
> one who followed up in agreement. And this is why: the simplest of
> discussions on this matter become torturous otherwise. We've spent a
> lot of time going round and round in this area which could have been
> greatly reduced if we had less ambiguous terms to use.

As I hope you know, I'm a supporter of getting more precision into
these discussions.  I was trying to move that forward, and have
clearly failed.  I appologise for my inability to be more clear.

I was feeling today that I at least, made some progress in
understanding Pierre-Antoine's proposal.  The language we used
was sufficiently precise to clarify differences in our 
conceptions of what is going on here.

However, I feel sufficiently chastised that I'll have a go
at a more formal approach, something I should have done a
while ago.

Merry Christmas

Brian

Received on Thursday, 21 December 2000 13:17:39 UTC