Thinking Cap questions: The Lame-Duck edition

["Subbarao Kambhampati" <rao@asu.edu>]

First, a link:

Here is a link to the "Chinese room" argument:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room

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Here are some points to ponder on the recent topics:

0 (don't need to answer on blog): We talked a lot about syntax and
semantics. Using English as the example, think of (a) whether
an ungrammatical sentence can have semantics (b) a sentence with "no
meaning" can be grammatically correct.
Consider the famous example: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
(Check out ***
http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/f06-cse471-mailarchive/msg00090.html for the
history of that
sentence...)<http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/f06-cse471-mailarchive/msg00090.html>
*

1. We talked about the fact that XML is a syntactic standard and doesn;t
have semantics. Do relational databases have
semantics?  (And if so, then won't a conversion of a relational database to
an XML form preserve those semantics?)

Consider the case of the use of the database by someone who knows and
understands the database schema as well as a
lay user that doesn't

[In thinking about semantics, it is useful to think in terms of the "worlds"
that are consistent with a data/knowledge base.
You will say that a formal sentence has semantics if you can enumerate
worlds where it is going to be true (or alternately,
given a completely specified world, you can tell whether or not that
sentence is "true" in that world. As you add more and more
sentences to a knowledge base, you constrain the number of worlds that are
consistent with it.]


2. Here is a question that one of the students asked after the class: We
said XML can be viewed either as ordered or unordered.