RE: NPR, Godel, Semantic Web

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 12:47 PM 5/7/01 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>At 11:14 AM 5/7/01 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> >The semantic web doesn't trip on godel or
> >incompleteness.   It trips on authority.
>
>It may well trip on authority, but this claim suggests that it also trips
>on inherent limitations of logical processing.

I should clarify this claim as it was made on the radio.

It's not that such systems will return wrong answers - it's that there are 
right answers they cannot find.  How that would echo through a system or 
whether users would even notice the missing information isn't clear.

Again, if anyone has a better explanation, I'd love to see one.  Otherwise, 
I guess I'll be calling NPR to track down the mathematician they were 
interviewed.


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly & Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books