Re: rdf as a base for other languages

From: "Geoff Chappell" <geoff@sover.net>
Subject: Re: rdf as a base for other languages
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 07:47:10 -0400

> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Crowther" <peter.crowther@networkinference.com>
> To: "'Graham Klyne'" <GK@ninebynine.org>
> Cc: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
> Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 8:09 AM
> Subject: RE: rdf as a base for other languages
> 
[...]
>
> It seems to me RDF as a method of exchanging positive ground triples between
> agents of varying capabilities will be useful regardless. There will surely
> be consumers of RDF that have no inference capabilities whatsoever and will
> need to rely upon producers of RDF to make whatever inferences they are able
> to make (or choose to make) before returning results as ground facts. This
> may result in a lossy knowledge transfer as the generalized intentions
> encoded in the producers knowledge base are "hardened" into specific facts
> acceptable to the consumer or are disregarded altogether, but you can
> imagine that this will suffice for many applications. And as you say, any
> agent should be able to distinguish facts encoded for a particular extension
> and disregard them (or at least be able to avoid misinterpreting them).
> 
> It only seems reasonable that any number of different reasoning systems will
> be build to work with RDF with many accepting the various logical
> restrictions of prolog, datalog, etc. in exchange for performance. Surely
> each of these systems can encode its own language as rdf triples. Even if it
> means that only a similar system can interpret that language, any system can
> interpret the output of the system (as long as it is conforming ground
> triple rdf). And if each of those systems included a description of its
> reasoning system in kif, we would have the basis for interchange of other
> than ground facts between systems.
> 
> Is that unreasonable? unworkable?
> 
> Geoff

But why do this encoding into RDF triples?  Why not have the other
reasoning system use their own syntax, which would certainly be better than
RDF triples?  If you are worried about a common base for the syntax, then
why not use XML or even Unicode?

peter

Received on Saturday, 2 June 2001 15:00:35 UTC