Re: RDF Terminologicus

Graham Klyne wrote:

> Stating:
>     The expression of an RDF statement [or set of statements]
>     in some context of discourse that is taken to be an assertion
>     of the truth of the statement[s] in that context.

Well as Pierre observed: 

 [every statement, isa, stating] and 
 [every stating, isa, statement].   

Nevertheless we should be able to avoid infinite regress by
understanding that a statement is an ~ideal~ thing just like
a perfect circle ... it exists nowhere in the real world. 
In the real world we have only statings. To state an "isa"
relationship (as I did above) between a real thing and an
ideal thing may end up being a category error.  I believe
CYC got around this by inventing a new property "genels".

But I have a bone to pick with your use of the word "truth"
in the definition.   I may aggregate a bunch of statements
and publish them ... when I do that, I am making no
assertion as to their truth or even their mutual consistency
... I might only be saying that I find them usefully viewed
together.  To get around this quibble, I have been toying
with a different definition of context:

Context:
  A context is a collection of statements 
  that are connected from the point of view 
  of a running process.

So, were we to decide not to have a strong commitment to any
particular epistemology, your definition might become:

Stating:
  The expression of an RDF statement 
  [or set of statements] in some context 
  of discourse.

Seth Russell
Has a RDF parser running on a win32 computer, thanks to
Jason Diamond !

Received on Friday, 5 January 2001 12:55:31 UTC