Re: What do the ontologists want?

> All of the above, with the possible exception of the Eliot quotation 
> example (which havers between direct and indirect quotation by its 
> literary usage of "says"), involve reference not to the form of an 
> expression, but to its meaning or content. The way to refer to the 
> meaning of an expression is to USE it, not to MENTION it, which is 
> what quotation/reification do.

Our messages crossed in the mail.  I later realized that you and I are not 
talking about the same thing when we say "quoting".  Your interest seems to be 
linguistics.  I'm almost never interested in linguistics when constructing an 
RDF model.  I'm interested RDF statements basically as logical predicates.

So while you attacked the Engish semantics of the examples I gave for 
reification, I think it's an argument without an opponent because I was 
strictly talking about logical predicates that could be interpreted as the 
English form I presented, for example (using an invented 
declarative/functional syntax):

X := is_own_season(midwinter_spring)
says(X, eliot)

The satisfaction of X over the universal quantifier is what I view as 
reification.  Hopefully you can fill in the rest of the examples from that.

> RDF usage of reification is built on a fundamental mistake: the 
> confusion between use and mention in linguistic analysis.

I think you're making an even more fundamerntal mistake that RDF reification 
has anything to do with linguistics.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
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Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 15:52:18 UTC