- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 22:19:54 -0600
- To: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- Cc: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>, Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>, Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>, www-tag@w3.org, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
>On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 06:44 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? 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. >I suspect that RDF wants it to be a thing with four legs. Which is John? Depends on what language you think you are understanding here. If its RDF, and if you have enough savvy to read some English as well, then John is a dog, an animal with four legs. This RDF uses '#Dog' to refer to the class of dogs, but nobody, including RDF, is saying that a string of four characters IS a class or a dog. > >>Nothing outside of RDF can specify what meaning RDF assigns to a >>string of characters containing a hash mark. > >Sure, if RDF wants to live in its own little world, that's fine. What do you mean, its own little world? RDF is a descriptive assertional language which can talk about anything under the sun. Of course it expects that its readers will know and use its own rules of grammatical form and semantic interpretation: that's understood as part of the very nature of being a language. But if that is 'being in its own little world', then every language ever invented or evolved is in its own little world. Shakespearian English is in its own little world. >But it's annoying to have some contradicting specs They aren't contradictory, if you read them correctly, any more than saying that you can encode PERL in bitstrings is a contradiction. >and I suspect it will run into problems when we try to put stuff together. It seems to be doing OK so far. Pat >-- >Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com] "Curb your consumption," he said. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 Thursday, 31 October 2002 23:20:21 UTC