Re: Peter's slides about the MOF metamodel

On 31 Jul 2008, at 17:35, Conrad Bock wrote:

> Bijan,
>
>> I don't see any part that's *not*. Where do you see it not being?
>
> I asked first.  :)

I answered: All of it usefully generalizes, afaict, over the current  
concrete syntaxes.

> You said "some flavor of the current metbamodel
> does, in fact, usefully generalize over all the concrete syntaxes I've
> seen".  What flavor is that?

The current flavor. I'm genuinely confused. I can look at a diagram  
and see how it corresponds to the functional syntax and the xml  
syntax and the manchester syntax and the rdf syntax without too much  
difficulty.

>> We use the conceptual model *everywhere*.
>
> Not sure what a conceptual model is.

I mean the basic organization of the metamodel (e.g., axioms,  
expressions, etc.) Just look at the table of contents.

> I'm referring to a metamodel for
> the W3C abstract syntax that's in the syntax document.

Yes. And it's organized a certain way.

>> Yes, if sufficiently important user groups rebel at what we do enough
>> we should change what we do or point them to where others are doing
>> what they want to do. Is that the case here?
>
> I would say yes, if you want to address users that look at the
> interchange format.

I don't know what you're saying "yes" to, esp. given the conditional.  
I think the diagrams will be helpful to people working with RDF/XML,  
at least when I'm teaching them. But if you just observe how people  
write stuff in RDF/XML for OWL you can see the syntactic patterns.

> It seems like tney would be a large proportion of
> the people looking at any textual syntax.

Conrad, pointing to specific problems would be more helpful to me  
than this sort of abstract speculation. I even pointed to some cases  
where one *might* think the metamodel should diverge between RDF  
syntax and other ones (i.e., one might want to have a notion of  
triples) and argued that we *shouldn't* do that divergence.

Cheers,
Bijan.