RE: struggling to understand conformance in POWDER formal semantics

It still may be unclear as to exactly what needs to conform and exactly how
it should conform (as mentioned in Quality Assurance Specification
Guidelines Requirement 1 [1]).  Perhaps these aspects should be clarified?

http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#conformance-clause

Thanks and best wishes
Tim Boland NIST


-----Original Message-----
From: public-powderwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-powderwg-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Phil Archer
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 11:35 AM
To: Dan Connolly
Cc: public-powderwg
Subject: Re: struggling to understand conformance in POWDER formal semantics


Dan,

Thanks for taking time to review our documents. I'll work through your 
comments, starting with this one.

Dan Connolly wrote:
> I'm puzzled by this...
> 
> "Conformance with this document means that Description Resources may be
> transformed from POWDER to POWDER-BASE to POWDER-S as set out below
> without any change to their semantics. When querying or inferring from
> the RDF/OWL graph, conformant implementations of this document will also
> implement the semantic extension defined below."
>  -- http://www.w3.org/TR/powder-formal/#conformancestatement
> 
> What product classes are being defined here?
> I see "conformant implementations" but I don't really see
> a definition of the form
> 
>   A conforming POWDER implementation is ...
> 
> as I'd expect.

Yes this is tricky as what the formal doc defines is:
1. The semantic extension
2. The transformation through the 3 species of POWDER.

Also, for various reasons (some historical, some practical), 'POWDER' is 
defined in 3 separate documents so we can't say "A conforming POWDER 
implementation is ..." in this document. We do say something similar in 
the definition of a POWDER Processor, however [1].

OK, but taking your comment on board, how about:

"A conformant implementation of this Recommendation will transform 
POWDER to POWDER-BASE to POWDER-S as set out below without any change to 
the semantics at each stage. When querying or inferring from a POWDER-S 
document (an RDF/OWL graph), conformant implementations of this document 
will also implement the semantic extension defined in Section 4.3."


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-powder-dr-20081114/#conformance

> I'd also expect to see something about conformance of documents,
> though perhaps that's in one of the other documents? In which
> case a cross-reference seems in order.

Agreed. So I'll add to the previous sentence: A separate conformance 
statement relating to POWDER and POWDER-S documents is given in Section 
2.9 of the the Description Resources document [@ref].

OK with you?

Phil.

-- 

Phil Archer
w. http://philarcher.org/

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 16:45:18 UTC