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?
> >
> >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.

No they're not.  They can be represented by character strings, but they are 
not so fundamentally.

Your statement is similar to confusing the following three things:

* the operation of extracting a number from a register and setting the 
instruction pointer to that number

* the CPU op code 56

* the assembler string "BRANCH ACCUMULATOR"


> 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)

OK, who are these people you're accusing of muddling up reification?  They're 
probably out there, but all I have to go on is your general accusation.

Of course reification refers to the abstract structure.

> , 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.

Not as far as I'm concerned.  It has nothing to do with syntax in my usage, or 
in the usage I see in RDF M&S.

> >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.

You consider such things very limited?  I guess it's all a matter of 
perspective.  I have found such things immensely useful in concept and in 
practice.

> Most of the proposed uses of reification in 
> the RDF literature seem to me to be based on confusion,

Again, please provide citations, or it would seem you're attacking straw men.

>  and many of  them - most notably, the idea that propositional structure and 
> quantification can be provided by reification - are just nonsense.

If by "propositional structure" you mean the structure of propositional logic, 
I don't see how it has anything to do with linguistic syntax.  In fact, as I 
understand it, the disconnect between propositional logic (really, FOL) and 
natural language is one of the undiscovered holy grails of AI.

I certainly think RDF can find tremendous utility given more realistic 
expectations.


-- 
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
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 16:04:00 UTC