Re: What do the ontologists want

pat hayes wrote:
[...]
>      PS My apologies if this is leading too far from the original thread
> 
> Not at all: I think you have put your finger right on the button. There is a mismatch between the reality and the rhetoric of RDF. As a general-purpose graph-structure-encoding formalism, it is just fine. (It has a truly awful surface syntax, but everyone agrees that is a crock and needs replacing.) But it hasnt been sold as that: it has been sold as a universal knowledge/information representation language, with a clear semantics which is both utterly simple (relational triples) and simultaneously universal, post-Goedelian, trans-Tarskian and magically universal, due to the Power of Reification. That is why it is going to be the, I don't know, the magical essence of the Semantic Web, and why W3C seems to be so committed to it.

Oh for cryin out loud, Pat, just cut it out. Exactly
who is taking that position? Cite sources or retract it.

Yes, there has been some confusion, and yes, some folks
are saying things about RDF that can't possibly be
true, but I think folks are here to learn and
build something useful. And insulting
them/us by taking some things that they/we may have said
exaggerating them to the ends of the earth isn't
getting us anywhere, is it?

> And this is just plain bullshit, as anyone who knows almost anything about Krep will immediately tell you. 

Of course what you wrote is bullshit. So let's
leave it out of the conversation, OK?

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2001 23:23:09 UTC