Language?

At 09:37 PM 4/26/01 +0100, Lee Jonas wrote:
>Yes, higher-order is incorrect terminology.  I am a bit confused about
>calling it a meta-language, though.  It depends on whether RDF is a
>'language' or not.

I think the RDF graph structure *is* a language in the sense commonly used 
by computer scientists and others... it has a set of component symbols and 
generative rules governing the construction of well-formed "sentences" or 
"formulae" from these.

>   Agreed certain RDF 'vocabularies' can be thought of as
>languages, so in that sense it would hold true.

It's less clear to me that RDF vocabularies are languages in the same 
sense, though it has been convenient at times to talk about them as 
such.  (The open-ended nature of RDF tends to mean that vocabularies don't 
describe "sentence" construction in the same way that languages generally do.)

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
GK@NineByNine.org