Re: rdf as a base for other languages

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
To: <geoff@sover.net>
Cc: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 2:59 PM
Subject: 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
>
> > 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

I guess I'm assuming that there will be benefits derived from reuse of the
storage and transport systems for rdf that will likely emerge - so though a
system may not be able to always "understand" the triples it's handling, it
can still store them and perhaps pass them along to another system that
might be able to understand them (or "learn" to understand them in time).
There's also perhaps some benefit in passing around tokenized forms of other
languages (parse-trees in triples) -- this might lessen the burden of
language to language translators somewhat. And of course I'm assuming that
the ultimate output of the combined system includes rdf facts to "dumb"
(inference-free) rdf consumers.

I agree the assumptions may be wrong and the arguments not particulary
compelling. In the end I'm just trying to understand what the future
landscape looks like - what the vision is  that is driving the continued
development of rdf.  Will there be a single rdf-based knowledge
representation language ordained as the language of the semantic web? if
that's the case, why bother developing a new one - just add uris to kif,
give it an xml serialization, and call it done. Or will a base-level system
develop based upon rdf as an carrier of ground facts and schema/taxonomy
definitions that allows many different systems to play? In such a system
what does the interaction look like?

Geoff

Received on Sunday, 3 June 2001 10:05:37 UTC