- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 10:55:20 -0700
- To: Bill de hÓra <dehora@eircom.net>, "Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it>, "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Let me first say that I am a bit uncomfortable trying to discuss in terms of the "RDF Model Theory", since what I am talking about is independent from RDF, and I tried to explain it in plain English. But if I understand what you are saying, then I completely agree. I think that all of that formalism is simply saying "Whenever something other than a URI is used to identify a thing, it is impossible to know that two assertions are about the same 'thing', even if the same words are used to identify the 'thing'" That is exactly how things should be. In other words, if I said: (http://www.microsoft.com/ isOwnedBy) hadIncome lots and: (http://www.microsoft.com/ isOwnedBy) residesIn prison The first (http://www.microsoft.com/ isOwnedBy) could mean "Microsoft Corporation" and the second could mean "some guy who owns one share of MSFT and is in prison". Clearly it would be invalid to assume that (http://www.microsoft.com/ isOwnedBy) refers to the same entity in both assertions. Also note that the issue of whether or not I can merge two different instances of (http://www.microsoft.com/ isOwnedBy) is *not* the same as the way that I constructed the assertion in my example. In my example, I was *asserting* that "The entity which owns www.microsoft.com made lots of income" rather than *inferring* it.
Received on Saturday, 27 April 2002 13:55:31 UTC