Re: Peter's slides about the MOF metamodel

On 31 Jul 2008, at 16:11, Conrad Bock wrote:
[snip]
> Most people who look at textual syntaxes at all will be looking at
> RDF/XML, because it is file format output from graphical tools.

Perhaps. I wouldn't be surprised if Manchester syntax was more common  
if only because of its place in protege 4 and topbraid composer.

> They
> will expect a metamodel reflecting that.

This is a big leap. Most people who look at textual syntaxes don't  
think about metamodels  at all :)

> I can see how a metamodel
> oriented towards "DL" or W3C abstract syntax would be useful for a
> limited audience, but not the majority of OWL users.

Au contraire. The RDF syntax *does* reflect the DL/functional syntax  
to a large extent. Just consider trying to read a simple class axiom  
in ntriples as oppose to a nicely framey RDF/XML version. It's  
obvious that the triple level version of expressions is *not* what  
most people think in terms in. It's not helpful *at all*.

I think that some flavor of the current metamodel does, in fact,  
usefully generalize over all the concrete syntaxes I've seen  
proposed. As such, it's *really useful* as a common conceptual  
framework.

If we proliferate metamodels, then we raise the cost of concrete  
syntaxes considerably.

Cheers,
Bijan.