Re: asn06 take 2 (Abstract Syntax as a kind of ontology?)

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> Thinking more about the abstract syntax question, I find myself
> wondering how an abstract syntax is really different from an ontology.
> Is there any practical difference between an ontology of Horn rules and
> an abstract syntax for Horn rules?  

One possible difference is that in an abstract syntax you can say 
whether ordering is significant or not.  Sure, as you argue, one benefit 
is that you can say "ordering is not significant here" but you can also 
(at least in ASN.1) say "ordering *is* significant here". Or perhaps 
that is just a feature of ASN.1 rather than of abstract syntax notations 
in general.

However, I think an ontology is closer to want we actually want for RIF 
and the only places we need to preserve order (e.g. in function/relation 
arguments) can be handled in an ontology.

> If this is true, then OWL is a probably a good way to write down our
> abstract syntax for RIF.

That's also, sort of, what Michael Sintek was pointing out.

> To recap the earlier discussion, the motivations I saw for using asn06
> instead of BNF were:

[Snipped good recap]

> Thinking over all this, I'm left with the conclusion that we can
> just use OWL as the meta-language -- we can use OWL to declare what
> parts a Horn rule has, etc.

I agree we can, though asn06 has the virtue of compactness. In 
particular expressing "list of" is a pain in OWL full (and worse in OWL DL).

> To play with this idea, I've been playing with transcribing Harold's
> EBNF into OWL [2] and then programmatically turning it into asn06 and
> (for folks who still want to use it despite the above reservationse)
> EBNF.  In other words, one can see asn06 as a concrete syntax for a
> sublanguage of OWL. 

Agreed.

Dave

Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 09:59:43 UTC