Re: What do the ontologists want?

Peter Crowther wrote:
> 
> > From: pat hayes [mailto:phayes@ai.uwf.edu]
> > [Jonathan Borden wrote:]
> > > Certainly being able to quote statements/triples is useful
> > > ... indeed a practical requirement.
> >
> > 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?

> Some systems are more obvious to design if there is a facility to make a
> statement about a statement.  Almost always, these are attributions: the
> typical example seen on this list, and the examples we used in SMK, are of
> the form "X says 'statement Y'".  (Question: Can anyone come up with a
> different use for reification?  If this is the only special-case, should
> there be a different mechanism for attribution?)
> 
> We were working with clinical systems, where the ability to attribute
> particular statements to clinicians was of legal importance in case of
> lawsuits.  No attribution, no adoption of system.  

Seconded: We are in a similar situation with agent-based command
information systems; having an audit trail and being able to timestamp
and attribute statements is absolutely essential here, especially as we
are likely to encounter deliberate misinformation which must be filtered
out at a later time.

For a local database we could achieve this 'outside of RDF' using a
custom framework, but we might want to be able to pass this attribution
information to and from other parties, in a standard way. Is there a
convenient way of doing that without reification?

Regards,

David Allsopp
DERA Malvern
UK

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Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 06:45:19 UTC