- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 22:35:06 -0400
- To: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Cc: 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. Well, yes, I now tend to agree, particularly after seeing the, shall I say, lack of universal acclaim which has greeted the ingenious attempts to get the best of both ideas. Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Monday, 29 July 2002 10:11:50 UTC