RE: universal languages

> From: Jim Hendler [mailto:jhendler@darpa.mil]
[...]
> Here's a stab at something - to me the most important idea in DAML is 
> the "equivalento" sort of mechanism -- it let's a first user define a 
> desiognator for Boston, a second user defines a different URI for 
> Boston, and a third comes along and says - they are the same

That's a really neat solution for abstract concepts.  As they'd say in the
British Parliament, "I commend the idea to the House" :-).

I'd hate to have to try to find and define equivalents for
concrete/host/call-them-what-you-will concepts, though; imagine any agent,
human or machine, searching the Web trying to determine equivalents of
<data:logic/rdf;10> (to quote Tim's earlier message) if no built-in
mechanism exists for expressing that concept.

> (the 
> issue of whether to believe the third person is irrelevant to this 
> discussion - all multi-person representation will need some sort of 
> caveat emptor mechanism or we'll all be in infinite loops forever)

Indeed.  Trusting your sources becomes a whole lot more important when
they're not just feeding you data, they're telling you how to interpret that
data as well.  Jim, I think you've just described a whole new area of
meme-viruses (virii?) where crackers try to poison systems' abilities to
reason...

		- Peter

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2001 14:36:31 UTC