- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 08:49:47 -0600
- To: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
>On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 10:19 PM, pat hayes wrote: >>>>RDF documents do not DESCRIBE fragments. They USE them. >>> >>>I have a triple: >>> >>>ex:John rdf:type <http://www.example.org/#Dog> . >>> >>>I grab http://www.example.org/, it's an RDF document that says (in part): >>> >>><rdf:Description rdf:about="#Dog"> >>> <dc:description>a dog, an animal with four legs</dc:description> >>></rdf:Description> >>> >>>According to the URI spec (via the links I cited), the #Dog is an >>>XML element. >> >>Wait a minute. What are you saying here? Are you DESCRIBING that >>syntactic thing that starts with a hash sign and has four ascii >>characters, or are you USING it to refer to something? > >Well, I'm defining it. That's a form of description, I guess. Right. You are talking about it, not using it; like when I say. 'Dog' has three letters, Im talking about the word; but when I say I don't own a dog, I'm using that word to talk about the things with four legs. > >>If the latter, what language do you take it to be in (and whose >>semantic rules you will use to help determine what it refers to)? >>Myself, I would use RDF, seeing as it occurs in an RDF document. In >>which case, the URI spec is irrelevant, since the entire body of >>all URI (and XML) specs ever written do not say anything at all >>about what it is that fragIDs must be used to refer to. And in that >>case, http://www.example.org/#Dog is a class (of dogs). '#Dog' is >>an XML element. > >Er, they do. That's what I just pointed out. According to the URI >spec (and its references I cited) http://www.example.org/#Dog >identifies "Identifies" is ambiguous. You tell me what you think it means, and I'll tell you which of the uses goes with which sense. In one sense, an identifier in a piece of program text identifes a datastructure; in another sense, it identifies whatever that datastructure is supposed to denote (which might be a number, or a process, or a fact stored in a database, or whatever). URI specs, the last time I looked, didn't say anything much about the second sense, the sense Ive been calling 'denotes', the sense that is used in model-theoretic semantics. >the XML element (<rdf:Description >rdf:about="#Dog">...</rdf:Description>). And according to the RDF >spec that URI identifies a class. Which is it? > >Perhaps I'm doing a poor job of explaining my argument; it sounds >like I haven't gotten through. Possibly. I have the same feeling, however. Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes s.pam@ai.uwf.edu for spam
Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 09:50:40 UTC