[-cc owl-dev; +cc www-archive]
On Fri, 2007-06-15 at 11:15 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
[...] The
Common Logic semantics does this properly, using the notion of a
'network name' which has a fixed denotation in all interpretations.
Aren't you arguing with TimBL in [EMAIL PROTECTED] that
fixed denotations in all interpretations are nonsense?
Or am I confused?
What Im arguing with Tim is that we can't just assume that a name has
a unique denotation, or that we can make it have one by making enough
assertions using the name (in English or in OWL/RDF/CL, though we can
probably get good enough for practical work in English, since we seem
to right now). That is, you can't attach names to their referents
just by using the name in text.
But it is possible to attach it to its referent by having explicit
naming/baptism conventions, provided we can somehow 'get hold' of the
thing we want to baptize in some language-free way, as we can for
network resources. Its like catching someone by the collar and
announcing, I'm going to call this guy 'Scooter'. That is part of my
point: we need some official, standardized, naming conventions. Named
graphs was one suggestion for an explicit naming convention. The CL
semantics presumes that this has been done somehow, so that CL
modules (=ontologies) have a name which is required to be a network
identifier, i.e. to be suitably 'attached' to the module by network
protocols. Then the semantics is that in *any* interpretation, it
denotes what it identifies (actually a bit more complicated than this
because it denotes the text without the name, so you can use equality
on them.) This is just imposed by the formal semantics. (What it
actually does is define a 'proper' interpretation as one that gets
this right, then as a conformance condition for a logic on a network,
redefines satisfaction w.r.t. proper interpretations.)
There has to be some actual convention like this in the spec
somewhere, and RDF/OWL doesn't have one. Unless you build it into the
actual language spec somewhere, you can't get the name-referent
attachment unique just by saying lots of stuff in the language.
Pat
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
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