Re: What do the ontologists want

Pat,

> >
> >I agree that there currently exists alot of fuzziness in this regard. I
am
> >in the process of trying to clean this up by providing a (hopefully)
logical
> >framework. http://www.rddl.org/SchemaAlgebra is a work in progress
> >addressing some of these issues.
>
> Great.  Thanks for the pointers and exposition. I will try to digest them.

Hopefully you have a robust digestive system. I am certain there are
syntactic issues in the way that I have written the formulae but hopefully
they are intelligable enough for you to understand what I am trying to
represent :-)

> >
> >'(says 'Jon '(isColor 'sky 'blue))
> >
> >what is the problem with access to structure?
>
> Ah, but now you have changed the quotation rules (if I follow you).
> This seems to be quotation as in LISP, where it really means
> something different: the quote mark is a tag to prevent evaluation.

yes. I was specifically assuming the existence of something like an 'eval'
mechanism.

>
> So it has no semantics at all? I doubt if that is really what you
> mean, since then it would have no point to it, as far as I can see.
> Certainly the RDF literature seems to *want* RDF to actually mean
> something.

I think the analogy is to LISP where the underlying datatype is a list, and
from this we can build structures that represent knowledge. 'abstract
syntax' is very apropos. In this case RDF triples are identical to car-cdr
register pairs. It is the structures that are built on top of triples that I
expect to be semantically interesting. This viewpoint may not be shared by
all in the RDF community, but nonetheless.

-Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2001 20:01:53 UTC