Hello,
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 1:30 PM, John Madden <john.mad...@duke.edu> wrote:
> We had an interesting call in TERM today. One of the topics I would like to
> boil down to the question "When does a document acquire its semantics?" or,
> "when does a document come to mean something?"
>
> I argued the (admittedly intentionally) radical view that documents have no
> semantics whatsoever until a reader performs an act of interpretation upon
> the document, which in the Semantic Web world would be the same as
> attributing an RDF/OWL graph to the document.
>
> Even if the author of the document attributes a a particular RDF/OWL graph to
> her won document, I argued that this graph is not privileged in any way. That
> others could justifiably argue that the author's own RDF/OWL graph is
> incomplete, or flawed, or irrelevant, or even incorrect. And the same is true
> of any subsequent interpreters (i.e. authors of RDF/OWL graphs that purport
> to represent the "meaning" of the same document).
>
> Eric argued a really interesting point. He argued (and Eric, correct me if
> I'm interpreting you wrong here), that semantics instead come into existence
> (or perhaps *can* come into existence) at the point when somebody executes a
> SPARQL query on a set of RDF/OWL graphs. That is to say, maybe I'm wrong and
> semantics doesn't even come into existence when somebody attributes an
> RDF/XML graph to a document; but rather it only comes into existence when
> somebody queries across (possibly) many graphs of many different people.
>
> What do you think?
Can you give an example were this difference is relevant?
Take care
Oliver
--
Oliver Ruebenacker, Computational Cell Biologist
Systems Biology Linker at Virtual Cell (http://vcell.org/sybil)
Turning Knowledge Data into Models
Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling
http://www.oliver.curiousworld.org
