- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 14:42:27 -0500
- To: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>
- Cc: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@mediaone.net>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
> > >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? > >Based on your follow-up to Jonathan, I think I know what you are trying to say >by "quoting" above, but I'm not sure how it comes into the discussion of >reification. > >I thought, and I'll bet most other thought, that you were talking about >attribution of atomic statements rather than attribution of character strings. Atomic statements, like most statements, ARE character strings. If you want to make a distinction between character strings and a more abstract syntax, and say that reification refers to the more abstract structure, then OK (though in that case I wish those who speak of reification would make their meaning clear) , but the basic point still holds, which is that quotation/reification is referring to the syntactic construct (more or less abstractly encoded) , not to the propositional content of that construct. >Do you not see the usefulness of attribution of RDF statements? Do you not >see the usefulness of reification for this purpose? As far as I understand what is meant by 'reification' in this context, I see only a very limited utility, basically things like tagging a string/expression with information about its source, time-stamping and so on. Most of the proposed uses of reification in the RDF literature seem to me to be based on confusion, and many of them - most notably, the idea that propositional structure and quantification can be provided by reification - are just nonsense. Pat Hayes --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 15:42:31 UTC