Re: [ontolog-forum] Can Syntax become Semantic ?

[Ali Hashemi <ali.hashemi+ontolog@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Phani,

A good place to start to understand what is meant by syntax / semantics etc is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics or http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/ 

(The first is easier to read but less precise, the latter is much more comprehensive, but might be in a slightly less accessible language)

Very briefly, people communicate in natural languages which computers are really bad at understanding. While it's (usually) not hard for people to understand the semantics in natural language, computers often lack the necessary "background" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Intentionality_and_the_Background ) to do so.

To partially address this issue, the Semantic Web is trying to convert much of that content into a machine readable form. Since natural language processing is still lacking, we use syntax which is less natural to humans but easier to parse for computers. One such syntax currently championed by the W3C is RDF.  RDF on its own is simply syntax -- it defines rules for how signs are connected to one another; ultimately, it is still up to the ontologist / user to define the semantics of what is written in the RDF syntax.

There is something called RDFS which _does_ include some semantics, but not in the sense of the car example you provided earlier. In general, these languages are all varieties of logics, usually less/more expressive variations of first order logic - a language which one can use to (ideally) precisely specify the semantics of an idea / domain / concept with minimal ambiguity.

So to answer your question: syntax on it's own simply provides rules for how signs are connected to one another. Semantics goes one step further, and specifies the acceptable connections between these signs AND their referents.

I would strongly encourage you to read the wiki and stanford philo encyclopedia to familiarize yourself with the basics. I think those documents would answer a lot of your ensuing questions.

Cheers,

Ali

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:57 AM, Phani Chaitanya <vsr.phanichaitanya@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thursday January 21 2010, Phani Chaitanya wrote:

> ...

>
> Hi Randall,
>
> Thanks for that. Now I get the issue that is addressed by Semantic
> Web. But I would like to know what does "The idea is to
> make the semantic content explicit and unambiguous" mean here. I
> mean, semantic content as in what ?

Whaddya' got?

That question is very much like asking what can be stored in a
relational database system.


Randall Schulz

I mis-understood the notion of semantics. I thought that Semantic Web is trying to address the semantics present in the language. But did not understand how are they going to get that from RDF etc. You told me that they are some universal format. But my question was what do you mean making the semantic content explicit (Just by making the databases explicit, what can users do ?).

If I search for something like "flights from Spain to England" in the Semantic Web, what is the output. Is it not something like google outputs ?. I want to know about that. That's why I'm asking you all to quote an example.
 

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