Re: What do the ontologists want

pat:
[...]
>Unfortunately that immediately makes the confusion I have been trying
>to disentangle. There are two issues here: using a statement (as part
>of some larger statement, typically) without asserting it, on the one
>hand; and making a statement ABOUT another statement, on the other
>hand. The latter is indeed widely called 'reification', (ie the
>statement about which something is said gets reified so that you can
>say something about it) and the RDF spec. seems to mean to refer to
>that; but the reason it gives for using it refers to the first idea,
>which is a completely different notion. Virtually the whole
>literature on logic, linguistic analysis, programming language
>design, parsing and so on - libraries and libraries full of stuff,
>stretching over more than a century - has managed to not make this
>elementary mistake, and to keep this basic and elementary distinction
>clear, so it is particularly frustrating to find that the formalism
>being touted as the fundamental basis for the entire semantic web has
>managed to screw it up so royally.

I understand that distinction between use and mention, but I'm still
not clear about the minimal mechanism that we need.

--
Jos De Roo, AGFA http://www.agfa.com/w3c/jdroo/

Received on Sunday, 20 May 2001 16:09:33 UTC