• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• To: Xia Li <xli@g...>
• Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:31:07 -0700

Xia Li wrote:
> The meaning existing in human mind is not sufficient for machine to
> understand the meaning of data. In order to have machine understandable
> data, the data has to be somehow associated with common vocabularies.
> There exist some mechanisms to do so. For example, RDF schema, OWL(web
> ontology language) etc. 
> 

Of course, some of us would dispute that even a shared vocabulary 
enables machines to "understand" anything. Machines may have behavior, 
but I don't think we've yet built one that can reasonably be said to 
"understand" anything. Personally I doubt we'll ever build a Turing 
machine that can be said to do that.

Furthermore, I don't think shared behavior is likely to be very useful. 
When you get down to it, it's really all just shared syntax, no matter 
how many turtles you pile on top of it. :-) 
<http://www.ddj.com/web-development/184415838>

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/

• References:
  • RE: "XML is just syntax" versus "Use semantic markup" (Is this a paradox?)
    • From: "Xia Li" <xli@g...>