Re: MISC: Internet Media Type registration: proposed TAG finding

[patrick hayes]
To: "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>

> >The comment there is reasonably clear as a constraint
> >on interpretations, no?
>
> NO!!! It is not in any way a constraint on interpretations, any more
> than a comment in a program is code. A comment is a COMMENT, and that
> is all. YOU can read that and understand it, Dan, because you are a
> HUMAN BEING WHO UNDERSTANDS ENGLISH. The whole point of the semantic
> web is to allow SOFTWARE AGENTS to do a little understanding. When
> you can write a Perl script that can figure out the content of the
> English comments, then maybe you can claim that the meaning of the
> comments is part of the meaning of the formalism. It still wouldn't
> be part of RDF, but you could call it RDFE .

I'd like to shift the emphasis of this part of the discussion.  I think that
there are a few perfectly good reasons for having a capability to include
comments, and for what they might be good for.

I think that everyone here, including Dan (though I don't mean to speak for
him)  recognizes that if it's a comment, it's for human consumption and it's
not going to be machine-usable.  However... it's well known that you can
prove geometrical theorems without any diagrams, and some argue that you
should never resort to diagrams.  But for most people, diagrams ***really***
help them work out proofs, appreciate geometrical relationships, and so
forth.

That's one thing comments are good for - helping people, like programmers,
understand the intent.  If you think otherwise, just try to write the model
theory Rec without explanations and see how well it is received ... if you
even can.

Another point, related to the first, is to help people understand the
intended meaning of and relationships between terms (i.e., labels and
names).  The fact that we generally use readable labels rather than GUIDs
reflects that these labels are actually comments, in a way.

It's true that software is going to work with abstract symbols, and that it
needs to be able to reason adequately using only the symbols.  But for
creating the programs, test cases, and some of the content they work with,
comments for human consumption will continue to be valuable.  That's what I
take Dan to be talking about.

Dan - is this close to the mark?

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2002 21:03:15 UTC