Re: The meaning of a document

From: "Aaron Swartz" <me@aaronsw.com>

> Tim expressed this himself in [2] as:
>
> "1.  The meaning of an RDF document is the sum
>   (in english, strictly conjunction) of the independent meanings
>   of the statements of which the RDF document is comprised."
>
> BTW, I believe it's widely agreed that the Model Theory spec
> defines the "meaning" of a document this way.
>
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-
> comments/2001OctDec/0324.html

Ok, I'd like read into the record here the second item too:

2. The meaning of an RDF statement is defined by the
  preciate used, and so is specified by the specification
  of the Property that is used as predicate.

Hmmm .... if we take both (1) and (2) together it seems that we could
conclude that:

 The logical meaning of an RDF domument is the
 conjunction of  the statements in the document
 and the statements in all the schema documents
 referred to by the Property terms in that document
 and all the statements in other documents
 referred  to by those schema documents.

In other words {:ChocolateLover dmal:complementOf  :NotCholateLover} is
meaningless unless we AND it to:

<rdf:Property rdf:ID="complementOf">
  <rdfs:label>complementOf</rdfs:label>
  <rdfs:comment>
    for complementOf(X, Y) read: X is the complement of Y; if something is
in Y,
    then it's not in X, and vice versa.
    cf OIL NOT
  </rdfs:comment>
  <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Class"/>
  <rdfs:range rdf:resource="#Class"/>
</rdf:Property>

and then also code the rdfs:comment in some kind of a RDF document too.  Or
are we to assume that our programs can respond to the meaning of English
sentences?  In other words: the total graph might look something like:
http://robustai.net/mentography/notLoveChocolate.gif
and have some response meaning to an inference engine which might be
answering a query.

But  I think just to say:
  {:Joe a [ont:complimentOf :ChocolateLover] }
in a document, has no meaning.

Seth Russell

Received on Sunday, 18 November 2001 14:05:31 UTC