Re: help wanted: RDF issue rdfms-assertion

>Lynn Andrea Stein wrote:
>>
>>  Hmmmm.....I am not concerned with what lawyers think.  I am concerned with
>>  Tim's statement that the *meaning* of an RDF assertion that *I* make is
>>  necessarily controlled by the *owner*of*the*URI* for the predicate I am
>>  using.  (Note that this is in direct contrast to Graham's 
>>suggestion, below.)
>
>I think bringing lawyers into the matter only muddies the waters. What
>is important is as Tim said "we must define the core algorithms for
>determining meaning without hesitation or ambiguity." When someone
>publishes something on the Web, they should be able to determine exactly
>what is implied by their statements, and others should be able to
>determine this as well.

Sure, but that isn't the main issue here. What about what is implied 
by their statements *together with other statements made by others* ? 
In RDF it is relatively easy to trace back any conclusions to their 
source, since entailment is so simple; but even in RDFS, a subclass 
relation might be inferred from two others published by different 
people, and the conclusion not be derivable from either one of them 
alone. So in general it is *impossible* to determine all the 
conclusions that anyone might draw from statements you make, if they 
are also allowed to use other statements. And RDF has been designed 
under the assumption that they are free to draw conclusions from 
*any* published content.

>The meaning of a predicate is determined by
>axioms in some selected set of ontologies.

If that is supposed to be a statement about 'meaning' in RDF, it has 
absolutely no basis in any semantics. So I suggest that it is either 
false or meaningless.

Pat
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Received on Monday, 10 June 2002 15:01:48 UTC