RE: What do the ontologists want

> From: Jim Hendler [mailto:jhendler@darpa.mil]
> At 11:58 AM -0400 5/21/01, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >In defense of stripped-down RDF, there is nothing 
> technically wrong with a
> >logical formalism that can represent only positive ground 
> triples.  Such a
> >formalism can certainly convey some useful semantic information.
> >
> >It is just that such a representation formalism cannot be used to
> >*represent* anything more than positive ground triples.  
> Using positive
> >ground triples to encode a more-expressive formalism 
> requires encoding, which
> >requires a new semantics, defined on top of the semantics 
> for the positive
> >ground triples, and makes it essentially impossible to use 
> the semantics
> >for the positive ground triples to represent domain information.
> 
> In other words, if someone built an ontology language on top of an 
> RDF-like langauge we could do important things with it.  Gee, why 
> didn't I think of that?

... but only those important things that are allowed by the RDF-like
language xor the appropriate consensual hallucination on top of it that
provides the extension to handle the encoding and the new semantics.  You
can use the semantics of one; you can use the semantics of the other; it's
combining the two and expecting an engine for one to (somehow) be able to
interpret the other that seems to generate so much heat on this list.

DAML+OIL is 'the semantics of the other'; it attempts to shoehorn in as much
of RDFS as possible and to give it a model-theoretic semantics, but as a
result cannot adhere precisely to the RDFS-only semantics.

		- Peter

Received on Monday, 21 May 2001 12:24:46 UTC