Re: What do the ontologists want

"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.

Is that true indeed? If a logical formula is encoded as a set of
statements, wouldn't it be possible to find an interpretation that maps
the corresponding resources into the domain of discourse, which contains
people, Web sites, logical formulae and classes?

Wrt the latter: it is absolutely necessary to map resources that
represent classes onto sets of objects in the domain of discourse (D)?
Would it be possible to map such resources to elements of D that
represent classes and have certain relationships with their members?

Sorry if the questions don't make sense - I'm not a logician.

Best,
Sergey

Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2001 21:33:25 UTC