- From: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 13:21:15 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-rdf-rules@w3.org
[Ben Grosof]
I know that some don't like the idea of having to do this. I think the
alternative of not being allowed to define such scoping is, however,
extremely undesirable. The idea of "all RDF anywhere on the web" as
something I would want to always *have to* use as my KB's scope is a
complete non-starter practically -- consider issues of data/knowledge
quality alone! (I'm tempted to say it's ridiculous. People talk about
"trust" on the Semantic Web. The most basic mechanism for trust is simply
to know what set of premises the inferences were drawn from. We'll be
laughed out of town in most practical IT settings if we don't have a good
story about this aspect of things.)
...
I have little to add here, except to agree with Ben 100%. Jim's
example sounds superficially plausible, until you realize that if you
must follow one innocent-looking pointer to a dataset, then by
transitivity you must take the entire web into account, which is
absurd.
As a corollary, the mere use of a namespace doesn't imply that an agent
must examine (let alone accept) the contents of some document
associated with that namespace. It's as if calling someone's theory
_merde_ requires accepting everything published in Figaro.
--
-- Drew McDermott
Yale Computer Science Department
Received on Sunday, 16 November 2003 13:21:28 UTC