Re: [xml-dev] markup humility

[Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>]

Liam, hello.

On 18 Feb 2022, at 19:46, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:

> On Fri, 2022-02-18 at 18:28 +0000, Norman Gray wrote:
>
>> If I want to say 'President Joyce is corrupt' or 'the present king
>> of France is bald', then I don't think it's the Semantic Web's place
>> to try to stop me.
>
>  Neither do i.  However, the Semantic Web didn't ought to go on to
>  encourage reasoning based on the "fact" without also remembering who
>  asserted it and in what context.

One rejoinder to that is that 'the Semantic Web' doesn't do any reasoning (I know this isn't quite what you said) -- it's people or their agents who do the reasoning.  Just as I mark up a bit of HTML to let a user-agent do some formatting with it, the SW lets me mark up an assertion in a way that a user-agent can do some basic reasoning with it.  This seems a very modest achievement (but only in retrospect), but it is a real achievement.

The textual web succeeded, where for example Xanadu didn't, because its actual core goals were extremely modest.  The SW has/had similarly modest core goals, but they're very hard to make out behind all of the superstructure.

I heartily agree with you that 'who asserted it and in what context' is vitally important, because a statement could mean different things in different contexts, and it's important for the SW to respect that.  But doesn't the idea of the quad-store do that already?  Each triple is annotated with the URI of the graph that asserted it, which can either be checked later, footnote-style, or be managed algorithmically.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK