Re: Proposal: variables, templates, and Stickey Cyber Molecules

Grahm,

Well actually both you and Tbl have misinterpreted my intentions ... let me
approach it from another angel.  RDF (bless its soul) is just a declarative
language. You can only declare and describe things in RDF, but you can't ask
questions.   Sure we can go outside of RDF and make a RDF query language (and many
have),  but it seems impossible to express in the language itself the simple
question:  "Who will program the sembrowser that I am working on? ".

So what I'm asking for is something akin to the English:  Who, What, Why, When,
Where ... and while we're at it we can throw in  "he", "she", "it" and the rest of
the pronouns.   Let's revisit my original proposal [1] which I still think is the
solution and just call the uri formats RDF pronouns.

Who = ?:PersonUnknown#x
When = ?:EventTimeUnknown#x
Why = ?:ReasonUnknown#x
How = ?:PropertyUnknown#x
she = ?:Female#x
he/she  = ?:Person#x
it = ?:Resource#x

The scope is always assumed (just like in English) as the current utterance ....
your { } context enclosures (which I notice Tbl also uses in N3)  will sufficiently
define the scope; the fragment disambiguifies the indexical.   But unlike English
we can make any Class whatsoever into a pronoun.   My question then becomes [:Seth
:wantsToKnow  ?:ProgrammerUnknown#x].

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Jan/0109.html
Note I switched the positions of the class and the variable after the original
proposal.

Sorry, I didn't realize when I started this that I was actually only talking about
pronouns.
Seth Russell

Received on Friday, 19 January 2001 12:46:40 UTC