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

On Wed, 2002-05-29 at 12:13, patrick hayes wrote:
> >On Fri, 2002-05-24 at 19:09, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >>  From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
> >>  Subject: Re: MISC: Internet Media Type registration: proposed TAG finding
> >>  Date: 24 May 2002 16:13:32 -0500
> >[...]
> >>  > The author of the best-friend document, by choosing to use
> >>  > ont:UniqueProperty class, licensed inferences
> >>  > based on the specification of that class. The conclusion
> >>  > that "35" is an :age of :margaret is supported
> >>  > by the DAML+OIL spec.
> >>
> >>  Yes, but not by the RDF spec, and any agent has no business labelling
> >>  anything as RDF inferences that are not sanctioned by the RDF model theory.
> >
> >Hmm... that's one way to think of 'RDF inferences'.
> >It's not one that appeals to me.
> 
> Well, sorry to speak plainly here, but tough shit.

I understand you to disagree.

> That is what 
> 'inference' *means* when qualified by the name of a formalism.

It seems to me there are many formalisms that fit in the
Resource Description Framework, if you mean 'formalism'
in the technical sense, ala

% Formal Systems - Definitions
% (from Ruth E. Davis, Truth, Deduction, and Computation.
% New York: Computer Science press, 1989.)
%
http://www-rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/305_html/Deduction/FormalSystemDefs.html
% (c) Charles F. Schmidt
% Last Modified: Saturday, May 08, 1999 9:07:08 PM GMT
http://www.w3.org/XML/9711theory/FormalSystem.lsl

But OK, I can see that it's misleading to use 'RDF inferences'
that way; Peter introduced it into the conversation, not I:

> >>  Yes, but not by the RDF spec, and any agent has no business labelling
> >>  anything as RDF inferences that are not sanctioned by the RDF model theory.

The agents in question don't label their conclusions as
'RDF inferences', so I don't see what his point is.

> If you 
> misuse English, then the appropriate thing to do is to ignore what 
> you say.

I don't think you'll find terms like 'RDF inference'
or even 'inference according to a formal system' in
an English dictionary.


> >  > > I can think of two agents (cwm and Euler) that
> >>  > do a lot more than simple entailment, when
> >>  > asked to. I think of them as RDF agents.
> >>
> >>  They are not.
> >
> >Er... I accept that as your opinion.
> >I disagree.
> 
> The please tell us what you do mean by the phrase. Right now I have 
> no idea what you are talking about, and your usage seems to be in a 
> world of its own.

I didn't introduce the term 'RDF agent' and I feel no obligation
to define it. When Peter introduced it, I inferred that an
RDF agent was licensed to conclude simple entailments plus
other stuff that it's instructed to conclude (e.g. by
feeding it more axioms on the command line).

My position on the matter at hand, media types for RDF/DAML+OIL/OWL,
is that we should have a media type, application/rdf+xml; documents
labelled with this media type necessarily license all simple
entialments that follow from them; but that's not the only
way that they constrain interpretations; they also constrain
interpretations according to the specifications of the terms
used as predicates in them.

For those that follow www-rdf-logic but not www-webont-wg,
it was originally stated in:

  Re: MISC: Internet Media Type registration: proposed TAG finding
  From: Dan Connolly (connolly@w3.org)
  Date: Thu, May 23 2002
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002May/0207.html

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2002 21:40:03 UTC