Re: What is truth anyways? was: [...]

Peter Crowther wrote:


>... I believe humans can, with sufficient
> effort, make *some* stuff work well enough to trust without having the
> formal semantics.  In particular, the following aspects make it easy:
>
> 1) Bilateral communications rather than peer-to-peer, allowing effective
> communication between producer and consumer of specification;
>
> 2) Well-understood problem domains, such as finance, giving a higer base
of
> common understanding to start with;
>
> 3) Restricted problem domains, such as a credit card application, giving a
> limited scope for any such communication;
>
> 4) Past experience of similar problems, giving a history of known
solutions;
>
> 5) Shared language between producer and consumer of specification;

Certainly this is important. But what about "shared language" on the
semantic web ... how does one really define what the semantics of a given
URI is, in a formal sense. It seems that unless this is done in an
unambiguous fashion, any formal infrastructure built on top is sort of like
rearranging, err straightening, deck chairs ...

>
> 6) Limited scope of implementation, for example a single banking system
> communicating with a central card issuer system;
>
> 7) Limited variation of environment, for example a credit card system that
> deploys particular card swipe hardware and software.
>
> All of these simplifying factors were present in your example.  None of
> these simplifying factors are present on the semantic web.  I consider the
> comparison between the two cases to be specious for that reason.
>

I wonder if the semantic web can meaningfully work without some of these
assumptions. An actual example of a working semantic web application that
doesn't make some of these would be helpful in convincing me otherwise.

Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2002 10:45:31 UTC