RE: Reification quoting in RDF/N3 was: A note comparing Conceptu al Graphs and RDF/Semantic Web

At 07:56 AM 1/18/01 -0500, Dan Brickley wrote:
[...]
>question 1:
>Does John know the email address of the person he believes Mary to live  with?
>
>question 2:
>Is the answer to Q1 determined by the semantics of the 'believedBy'
>relation we're using? ie. could we have 'believedby-transparent' vs
>'believedby-opaque' flavours of this relation to capture this distinction.
>
>question 3:
>Whether reading (2) above is read as '...the person', or '...a person'
>depends on knowing that foaf:mbox is a unique property. However John (or
>mary, or the first person narrator) may not know (or believe) this. Might
>John then believe that Mary livesWith any/all persons with that mail
>address?
>
>IMHO RDF as-is lacks precision in this area; but I stick by my story that
>this is a problem for the Web at large. One that it would be nice to see
>folk on this list have a crack at...

Dan,

I don't think it's the role of RDF per se to have precision in this 
area.  Rather, RDF is a kit of parts that can (hopefully) be used, in 
conjunction with semantics separately ascribed to certain RDF properties 
and classes, to build statements that precisely convey these meanings.

I think that, in saying this, I am generally in agreement with your 
assertion that this is a problem for the web at large.

#g

Received on Thursday, 18 January 2001 12:03:08 UTC