Re: [ratholes, reification, risk] poison-URIref testcases

This is, surprise, going down a rathole fast, so this is my last pulic
post on the topic...

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Graham Klyne wrote:

> At 10:05 AM 3/25/02 +0000, Jan Grant wrote:
> >On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Graham Klyne wrote:
> >
> > > I would argue that the "meaning" of some RDF is not the "conjunction of the
> > > meaning of individual triples".  Conjunction of "meaning" seems to be a
> > > meaningless (er, ill-defined) idea.  It is the _truth_ under some
> > > interpretation that is a conjunction.
> >
> >Unfortunately, that bit of the conversation seems to be missing from
> >Dan's quoted text.
>
> OK.
>
> >Dan's concern might be summarised as: "...but what if a URI _doesn't_ I
> >any R?" :-)
>
> By which I assume you mean have a mapping I(URI) in IR ?
>
> I think the definition of an interpretation requires that such a mapping
> exists (irrespective of whatever may be happen in the "real Web").

As I said to Dan: the MT defines an interpretation like this; it tells
you what a "standard intended interpretation" will look like.

It _would_ be possible to rewrite the MT document to use partial
interpretation functions, but all the theorems and definitions would
just have extra clauses (and proofs become similarly unmanageable) - for
very little (no) gain.

A better bet (I think) is to just do something Herbrandish - that is,
keep the current definition of "interpretation"; if you _do_ wind up
with one of Dan's problematical graphs (that is, one with a URI-labelled
node with no "meaning", ie, which doesn't denote anything*), you don't
really hurt yourself by letting it denote some mathematical figment that
doesn't collide with anything else.

I'm still not convinced that this is really a problem; just trying to
summarise what's giving danbri sleepless nights.

jan

* I've no idea how this could come about, apart from Dan insisting "No!
When I wrote this, I really didn't intend it to stand for _anything_!"
:-) - in other words, producing a uniform resource identifier that
doesn't identify a resource :-)

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
"Roger Penrose can never be convinced that this sentence is true."
(If he doesn't get the joke, you can at least prove that he owes you money.)

Received on Monday, 25 March 2002 07:30:28 UTC