- From: Miles Sabin <miles@milessabin.com>
- Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 11:32:35 +0100
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Jonathan Borden wrote, > I don't claim that removing ambiguity about the mapping of URI to > resource somehow removes all ambiguity in the system ... that would > be a miracle. I think we need to move step by step and clarifying the > relationship between URI resource and representation would be a great > first step. I agree that that's a valuable goal. But I'm not convinced that making the URI to resource mapping 1:1 actually promotes it. Take http://www.w3.org/ again. You say that there's a 1:1 mapping of that URI onto a resource. You also seem to be saying that there are contexts where that resource "means" a particular document, and that there are contexts where that resource "means" the W3C's web site. Right? I know what a document is, and I know what a web site is, but I've really no idea what a resource which might "mean" one or the other is, unless it's just an artefact of a semantic theory. Or try it again with another example: I know what a document is, and I know what a car is, but I've no idea what a resource which might "mean" one or the other is, again, unless it's just an artefact of a semantic theory. I have no problem in principle with semantic theories helping themselves to such artefacts so long as they do useful work. But it really isn't at all clear to me what good they're doing here. As far as I can see all we have is an implicit two-level model, where all the interesting stuff has been shunted off to the second level and ruled as out of scope for RDF. But now I'm beginning to lose my grip on the point of the exercise. If all the RDF MT is doing is regimenting the first, uninteresting, level (the one that isn't about cars or documents) then what's it for? If you can't saying anything directly in RDF about either cars or documents, then who cares about interoperable syntax? Why not just use KIF or first-order predicate calculus and be done with it? When you say you want to see contexts in RDF, do you mean you want something like a possible worlds semantics, where each context is a world, the MT is extended to accomodate interpretations over sets of worlds, and the truth values of non-modal assertions are fixed relative to worlds? That's a very attractive proposition, but it's such a radical departure from RDF as it actually is that I really can't understand what you're currently arguing about wrt resources. Changing the language and model in that way would change the nature of resources in RDF so fundamentally that we really wouldn't be talking about the same thing any more. Denying that would be a bit like saying that the integers sort of include fractions, because we can embed the integers in the reals. Cheers, Miles
Received on Sunday, 4 August 2002 06:33:07 UTC