Re: [xml-dev] Does data represent things besides entities, attributes,an

[Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>]

Seth Johnson wrote:
> Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>   
>> Michael Kay wrote:
>>     
>>>  
>>> To be honest, I'm not sure how either Abrial or RDF handle 
>>> the universal quantifiers, but hopefully you get the idea. 
>>> Basically, you're reducing the sentence to a set of basic 
>>> assertions and reducing it to predicate logic in a number of 
>>> variables, where the variables are the entities and the
>>> predicates are the binary relationships.
>>>   
>>>       
>> This depends on the supposition that our data is facts, doesn't
>> it?  I don't think that literature is facts, except by some
>> vacuous definition that rules everything in. So a fact-based
>> reduction of XML is not general.
>>     
>
>
> Literature is composed of facts, even if the facts are symbols
> representing fictional entities, etc. so thus they represent "the
> fact that the author/work said" x, y, and z.
>   
I would call that vacuously true.

What facts are there in Milton's 
<pre>Jesus wept & walked forth
from Felpham's vail clothed in clouds of blood</pre>
 
The markup is about one way of presenting the text, and would be just as 
true of some programming code. There are no facts being asserted by the 
markup about the semantics of the content.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe