[whatwg] RDFa discussion

[ddailey]

Thanks. Your advice here, seems, fundamentally, like a most sensible choice. 
96 (or so*) semantic primitives (e.g. act (generic verb marker), thing and 
essence (generic noun markers), value(quality and magnitude), able/possible, 
universal and existential, poset (brings comparatives for ancestry, modal 
logic, ethics and spatial process) , person, this/that/yonder (as in 
Navajo -- enables deixis for person, time, evaluative and space modalities), 
need, sense,  and think; adjectival mark, gender, negation (incl. voidance & 
reflection), time (including past present and poset/hypothetical), space 
(including those which are metric but non-dimensional, but certainly 
including directional vectors in nonmetric spaces flavored by vector 
bundles) ,  iteration/extrapolation/completion (for continuative aspects of 
verbs), number,  change, the SFOL conjunctions plus preventative and 
causitive, ...,    , plus an appropriate syntax (parentheses plus 
crossreferences:  i.,e., , graphs), I think, suffices to encode most of the 
non-molecular cognitive reality of humans (and several hypothetical 
categories of sentient species ).  The molecular world populated by halibut, 
coca-cola, guitars and rhinos is likely to require an open and extensible 
format, but plain old human thought as expressed in philosophy, teleology 
and mechanism is likely not to require much more, until, perhaps, we mutate. 
Of course the expressive power of such a system includes undecidable 
subsystems and likely allows the derivation of contradictions, but humans 
have generally not been known to implode under exposure to simple 
contradictions, so that need not be a problem for inference engines.

So I think a proper full-bodied inferential realm can indeed be hashed out. 
Providing a forum for that to be done, off-list,  seems great since the 
whatwgers often seem to use "semantics" to refer to something rather 
different than "meaning" in the sense of human linguistics.

cheers,
David
*I rather doubt that the number is prime, though determining that has been 
shown to be NP-complete for arbitrary monolingual dictionaries.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Hickson" <ian at hixie.ch>
To: <whatwg at whatwg.org>
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 4:50 PM
Subject: [whatwg] RDFa discussion


>
> It seems that there is a lot of discussion here but I haven't really seen
> much progress. Part of the problem seems to be that there are some pretty
> fundamental disagreements on what we are trying to do and whether anyone
> cares to do it. :-)
>
> In order to better document this back-and-forth, and to reduce the total
> number of e-mails I will have to reply to when I eventually deal with this
> topic, I would like to invite people to place the goals and requirements
> of the technologies being proposed on this wiki page:
>
>   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Generic_Metadata_Mechanisms
>
> I would then like people to place their arguments pro and con each point
> on that same page. I have tried to put in some placeholder arguments to
> show how that might work.
>
> -- 
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
>