- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 16:23:11 -0600
- To: guha@guha.com
- Cc: www-rdf-logic@w3.org
>I think this confusion between the graph being the semantic >thing vs being a higher level syntax is an artifact of the >extremely limited expressiveness of RDF today. > >Without connectives or quantifiers (and no, reification >does give us a way out of this), does or does not? > there is a certain >isomorphism between the triple syntax and the semantic model >(the graph) which is very confusing. Well, yes and no. The structures are isomorphic, but the relationship between the expressions of the language and their interpretations are usually fundamentally different from those between abstract and concrete syntax. For example, typically the more things one says, the more one *constrains* the set of possible interpretations, so that the set of interpretations which satisfy the assertions gets smaller as the set of assertions increases; exactly the opposite for the syntactic relationships. (Which is what makes me suspicious of your answer that the graphis best regarded as an interpretation of the RDF.) >At some point, when we bite the bullet and introduce >connectives and variables as language constructs into >RDF, I think the difference between the syntax and >semantics will become clearer. Well, I surely hope so. RDFS for example seems to want to be about things like classes and properties, rather than about graphs. Pat --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Monday, 4 December 2000 17:21:40 UTC