- From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 14:00:53 -0400
- To: sandro@w3.org
- Cc: phayes@ai.uwf.edu, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> Subject: Re: A Single Foundational Logic for the Semantic Web Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 14:39:11 -0400 > > [Pat Hayes] [...] > > None of this [stuff about programming] has anything to do with what > > the RDF/DAML/OWL development effort is about, seems to me. > > That statement is both outrageous and totally understandable. We're > arguing with some pretty ambiguous terms here. I'll try to be more > precise; stop me when go wrong. (like I have to say that....) [...] To me, Pat has hit the nail squarely on the head here (and, conversely, Sandro is making no sense to me). If what you want is a univeral computational mechanism, and, moreover, one that no-one will read directly, then any Turing-complete computational mechanism will work, be it Post production systems, the lambda calculus, the Java virtual machine (or whatever it is called), or even deduction in first-order logic. Taken in another way, if this *is* what you want, then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to use deduction in some logic that can encode the operations of Turing machines. You may as well use a nice (for both humans and non-humans, if this is possible) programming language. Computer scientists, and, especially, designers of programming languages, spend a lot of time on this issue. If, however, you want to represent information, and, perhaps, even transmit that information to other computational devices (including both human and non-human computational devices), then you are in a very different world. In this better world, computational adequacy is no longer the metric to use. Instead some version of representational adequacy is much preferable, tangled up with computational issues. Logicians, and, hopefully, designers of knowledge representation formalisms, spend a lot of time on these issues. Peter F. Patel-Schneider Bell Labs Research
Received on Tuesday, 30 April 2002 14:01:16 UTC