- From: Peter Crowther <Peter.Crowther@networkinference.com>
- Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 00:03:07 -0000
- To: "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
> From: Dan Connolly [mailto:connolly@w3.org] > On Fri, 2003-01-17 at 08:15, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote: > [...] > > I would prefer it if the OWL documents could be silent on > this issue, and > > let usage, convention, etc., determine social meaning, as > they have always > > done. > > The risks associated with doing that are unacceptably high, to me. > > Namely, that people will claim that offers for sale, privacy > and security policies, etc. *do not* have their usual > social meaning (i.e. that their authors can be held accountable > for thier contents) when written in OWL. > This risk has already materialized for P3P. Just a comment... they will claim that anyway, no matter what a specification document says. At best, the spec might be used in a court of law to indicate what the originators of the spec might have thought about the issue; however, in an English-style system of law where case law is king, the spec cannot do anything much except inform the Court in any particular case. Only once a body of case law has built up can the issue of social meaning be addressed in any legally meaningful way. > For an elaborate rationale, see TimBL's essay... > > "Bits mean something." > -- The Stack of Specifications > Tim Berners-Lee Date: 2002/05, > last change: $Date: 2003/01/06 19:40:09 $ > Status: personal view only. Editing status: rough.. > http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Stack Yeeeesss... definitely worth a read. See particularly the comment on 'Problem: this does not always happen' at the bottom of 'publishing an XML document' and 'When the chain does not connect' - TimBL argues that quoting is essential for bits to mean something. Oh... guess what's missing in everything except OWL Full... and we don't know how to do interoperable things with Full as everyone will implement their own (possibly incompatible) incomplete subsets for their own special purposes such as calendaring. And if the implementations are incomplete in different ways, then how can we ever be sure that they will interpret these extremely important bits in the same way? I'm really not convinced that OWL, as currently specified, could be used in the way detailed in that essay. > > However, the RDF Concepts document normatively states that the > > entire social meaning of an RDF document is a part of the > RDF meaning of > > that document. > > Yes, that's as it should be. The RDF and OWL WGs are > in the W3C Technology and Society domain for a reason: > to see that the technologies are properly connected > to the social systems around them. > > > Therefore I believe that the OWL documents must explicitly > > disavow this view. > > That's unacceptable to me. Maybe OWL should pick up the view of 'social meaning' from the layer on which it is transported. In the case of OWL/RDF, it picks up the social meaning part of RDF. In the case of OWL/XML, it would have a formal meaning but no social meaning. In which case I'd use OWL/XML, despite its non-normative status. Requiring 'social meaning' and not having the combination of acceptable quoting mechanisms and realistically interoperable software would not be acceptable to me personally. Note that I have not consulted Network Inference for company views on this email; it is purely personal opinion. - Peter
Received on Friday, 17 January 2003 19:04:22 UTC