- From: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 18:04:15 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-rdf-logic@w3.org
[Pat Hayes]
Brian has not published the full gory details behind his example.
Allow me to fill them in, so you can better appreciate the reasoning
involved here. But be warned, before reading further, that this may
corrupt your intuitions so badly that your opinions on the test cases
may become worthless.
Too late!
We (the WG, that is) found ourselves caught unable to come to a clear
decision between the two extreme positions of complete tidyness
(literals are unique, have a fixed denotation) and complete
untidyiness (literals can mean anything, and different occurrences of
the same literal can mean different things.) So we have been trying
to find intermediate positions which capture the best of both worlds.
One of these positions (we have tried many of them) is the following:
literals are syntactically tidy (ie like urirefs, there can be only
one node per literal per graph) but semantically untidy, in that the
way that the literal is interpreted might depend on the triple in
which it is considered; in particular, it might be a function of the
pair consisting of the literal itself and the property of the
triple.
Perhaps it's my corrupted intuitions, but it seems to me that
syntactic tidiness is beside the point, merely a technical detail. To
be untidy is to be semantically untidy.
-- Drew McDermott
Received on Friday, 19 July 2002 18:04:20 UTC