Re: Language?

At 12:09 AM 5/8/01 +0100, Craig Pugsley wrote:
>Maybe I'm missing the point, but its my view that the key simile to a
>'conventional' spoken language that RDF carries is its ability to convey
>semantic information. We use languages to convey our own personal semantic
>representations of abstract concepts and ideas we have. And this is exactly
>what RDF is intended to (or at least 'can') do.

I think that *any* language can be interpreted to convey semantic information.

I think a goal of RDF is that it is structured in a way that makes it 
usable to convey a range of useful knowledge in a machine processable 
form.  That is, it is not the ability to convey semantics per se that makes 
RDF useful so much as the particular engineering choices for machine 
processability.

[...]
>I'd say that RDF <is> a language, very much in the same sense as non
>computer-based language.

I won't argue that point.  But it's not clear to me how non-computer 
languages are fundamentally different from computer languages, other than 
computer languages being engineered for machine interpretation of problem 
solutions in a relatively limited domain.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
(GK@ACM.ORG)

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2001 01:47:52 UTC