Re: GRDDL and OWL/XML

On Sat, 2008-05-10 at 00:39 +0100, Bijan Parsia wrote:
[...]
> 3) When you have a normative spec for a transformation function (as  
> OWL does), adding an XSLT sets up a 'second variant' of the spec (as  
> well as being a blessed implementation) and one that gets directly  
> used in spite of it being nominally informative. This is a violation  
> of DRY (don't repeat yourself) and divides attention from verifying  
> the actual spec (e.g., with multiple implementations). Worse, bugs in  
> the program become part of the de facto spec.

That's a reasonable argument for not using GRDDL to relate
OWL 2 to RDF/XML. If the OWL 2 WG doesn't think that it can manage
a reference implementation of the transformation in XSLT*,
then it shouldn't use GRDDL.

* or maybe XQuery, though it's hard to imagine the difference
between XSLT and XQuery making or breaking the case.


[...]
> I feel fine in asking a W3C wg to provide a specification *for the  
> transformation function*, but it should not be the presumption that  
> saying "Support GRDDL" means providing an implementation.

Presumption? It's a straightforward reading of the GRDDL spec, no?

"Developers of transformations should make available representations in
widely-supported formats. XSLT version 1[XSLT1] is the format most
widely supported by GRDDL-aware agents as of this writing ... ."
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E