Re: the mythical RDF inference engine was: Re: What is truth anyways?

Graham Klyne wrote:

>
> At 05:46 PM 6/12/02 -0500, patrick hayes wrote:
> >OK, stop right there. You said OWL is representing facts in RDF. To me
> >that sounds like saying that Im talking English in French: it simply
> >doesn't make sense. Which language are you referring to? RDF or OWL?
> >Because they are *different*.
>
> I heard on the radio recently that linguists have a concept they call
> "cross coding" (or something like that) where people mix words and
> structures from different root languages in their
> conversations.  Popularly, some of these have been raised to the status of
> a language in their own right.  I believe "Spanglish" (English+Spanish) is
> a common case.   ...

> My point is that, even with spoken natural languages, there are cases
where
> one language is a subset of another;  i.e. an expression in language A can
> be understood as having the same meaning in B.
>

Well yes, but moreover in modularly extensible 'languages' such as LISP it
is
"de rigeur" err, "order of the day" to define a new "language" by loading in
a set of new terms which are defined in a module. The point is that LISP was
designed to allow this. Now suppose that we are actually to try and define
OWL based on the primitives available in RDFS.

Jonathan

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2002 06:56:18 UTC