Re: What do the ontologists want

pat hayes wrote:

> Can you (or anyone) say why the ability to quote is considered a
> practical necessity? From where I am standing it seems an arcane and
> exotic ability, not one that is of central practical importance. What
> is the practical utility of being able to refer to a predicate,
> rather than use it?


What is arcane or exotic about the ability to say:

'Jon says "The sky is blue."' ?

It is the most complex type of statement my 18 month old daughter is able to
make. Literally she recently said: "Grandma say 'Sarah did dat!'" which was
true, or so I say :-)

In any case, the ability to create a reference to something has proven
itself useful in my practical experience.

The reason I have suggested that quotation be implemented in a fragment
identifier syntax is that URI references are how we refer to things on the
web, and a statement is one of the things we might want to refer to.

Quotation is related to query and in the same way as XPath serves as a
simple query language for XML, an RDF path language might serve as a simple
query language for RDF. For example:

?x says "The sky is blue"


-Jonathan

Received on Monday, 14 May 2001 23:02:16 UTC