- From: R.V.Guha <guha@guha.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 10:44:55 -0700
- To: patrick hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- CC: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
patrick hayes wrote: > > No doubt the inventors of RDF did not intend to impose global > consistency; such an ambition is obviously slightly insane. However, > as a matter of fact, this insane assumption is built into the very > architecture of RDF as it exists. RDF provides no way to make any > other assumptions. It provides no way to agree or disagree, no way to > define, no way to negotiate, no way even to question, any content. It > only provides a simple way to make elementary assertions using a > global vocabulary. It is obvious that this will not work unless there > is some global coherence to the assertions made using the global > vocabulary, unless there is some way to negotiate content and handle > contradictions. Pat, You seem to be making the assumption that a processing agent somehow has a "global" view of all the data on the SW. There is an alternate view, one I would argue is the only one which makes sense, i.e., that at any time, any particular agent can only see small windows of this giant net. It is not unlike the web, where no one has ever seen the entire web (no, not even google). Different agents, see small parts of it. And hopefully, these small parts will be internally consistent (yes, yes, rdf doesn't deal with the last part, but that is not the point of this message). guha
Received on Thursday, 23 May 2002 13:45:18 UTC