- From: Dickinson, Ian J <Ian_J_Dickinson@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 09:54:15 +0100
- To: www-rdf-logic@w3.org
From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@mediaone.net] > 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."' ? I'd also suggest that practical reasoning systems might want the ability to record provenance of statements (statedBy, statedOn, source), context (isTrueIn), explanation (hasProof, hasJustification), uncertainty (withProbability) or counter-arguments (refutedBy). What I expect is that, while any given reasoning system will have its own optimised storage and processing schemes for such information, the ability to exchange data between reasoning systems will be based on sharing a common interlingua. If a facility like quoting could be defined in a logically sound and robust way, it would provide a straightforward, uniform and extensible mechanism to represent many such meta-level statements. So I could take that mechanism and, without any extension of the syntax, use it to represent in the interlingua, say, assumption labels from a TMS for my statements. Cheers, Ian _______________________________________________________________________ Ian J. Dickinson HP Labs, Bristol, UK mailto:Ian_Dickinson@hp.com
Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 04:54:20 UTC