Re: Are we losing out because of grammars? (Re: Schemaambiguitydetection algorithm for RELAX (1/4))

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Bill dehOra wrote -

>:Suppose I ask for the
>:interest rate and I meant a simple rate, but you return the
>:yearly compounded
>:rate instead because "interest_rate" was requested and you
>:could supply one.
>:I know that's simplistic, I'm just trying to boil things down
>:to simplicity.

>No, that's a good example. My impression (and if anyone wants to correct me,
>please do) of one way the semantic web intends to deal with this is to point
>to a machine readable dictionary definition of interest_rate. So when I
>write a query to a Linda space (the intersection between these systems and
>RDF is very interesting btw), I need the query to point to a namespace or a
>computable definition for interest_rate. When something wants to fill the

Linda<->RDF intersection - yes, very interesting!

>...
>One other way is to have enough properties
>hanging off interest_rate to compute a match: ultimately I think it boils
>down to the first way, which is a lookup on a graph, for want of a better
>description. So the fields here are not simple fields, they really stand for
>graphs, implict or explicit, and the act of matching becomes an attempt to
>merge two graphs.

Even with the first way, the field has to supply the dictionary, so either
way, the field has to have some more complex structure if we're interested in
interoperability between systems that barely know each other. BTW, it wouldn't
have to be either/or, would it?  It would be good to provide for multiple ways
to proceed.

Bill, I think you've clarified this nicely.

It seems to me that the same considerations apply even if you are not talking
specifically about Linda-like systems.

>That of course means one has to supply an out of band definitions for their
>flavour of interest_rate. The interesting thing being, with a graph lookup
>you don't have to know that defintion ahead of time to reply. You only have
>to know if you can link to its definition.

Well, you have to know how to ***use*** the definition, too.  Could --- Son of
RDDL ---  be on the horizon???

Cheers,

Tom P