Re: How do RDF and Formal Logic fit together?

>  > From: "Sandro Hawke" <sandro@w3.org>
>>
>>  > The problem here is that your labeling of "?everyone" as a univerally
>>  > quantified variable, while it is carried by RDF, is not part of the
>>  > definition of RDF.
>>
>>  Hmmm... neither is the definition of 'is strong with' in RDF, that
>>  definition needs to be layered on top of RDF in a schema.   What makes the
>>  definition of 'forall' any different in this regards?   But I understand
>>  what you are saying, I just think saying it with the words "we can't use RDF
>>  as the only language" is misleading because we certainly can use RDF as the
>>  only carrier, and what is a carrier but a language  ... right?
>
>Perhaps its best to think of the RDF Graph syntax like XML or
>S-Expressions or even ASCII: it's a syntactic system of restrictions
>that helps us process a variety of languages with a lot of common
>infrastructure.

I agree that would be great, but unfortunately RDF isn't quite good 
enough for that. Its just *too simple* to be useable as a general 
syntax model. If it had used quadruples instead of triples, or had 
some kind of context or scoping mechanism, or had some way to string 
together sequences without forcing the use of reification; any of 
those would have worked; but plain graphs just don't cut the mustard.

>When one agent is talking to another agent in RDF/XML, for real
>communication to happen, you need to standardize on a lot more than
>RDF/XML, you need to define your vocabulary.   Having picked RDF was a
>big help (like picking ASCII was a big help long ago).   In fact,
>picking that vocabulary is where the interesting stuff happens.
>
>I'd like to understand what happens when you say something using seven
>different vocabularies, four of them interacting, and a receiving
>agent only understands a partially-overlapping four.

So would I!  That is a really big issue that goes way beyond RDF, though.

Pat


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Received on Saturday, 13 October 2001 00:25:04 UTC