Re: SWIG F2F during W3C TPAC week, Oct 20/21 (Cannes, France)

From: "Danny Ayers" <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: SWIG F2F during W3C TPAC week, Oct 20/21 (Cannes, France)
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 18:31:54 +0200

> 2008/9/1 Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>:
> >
> > From: "Hausenblas, Michael" <michael.hausenblas@joanneum.at>
> 
> >> Peter,
> >>
> >> >I would be very interested in reading a full specification of
> >> >N3.  Could you point me to one?
> 
> best I know of is:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/cwm.tar.gz
> 
> (although I'm not sure about literal handling)

Hmm.  That appears to be the source for CWM.  Which file should I go to
in the tarball?  Is there any formal relationship between CWM and N3?

Following links from files in the tarball ends up at 
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3
which does claim to be "the specification of the Notation3 language".
The document appears to be the source of a large portion of the team
submission on N3.

> >> Dunno, is http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/n3/ 'full' enough?
> 
> > In a word, "non".  In two words, ....  (You probably don't want to know.)
> >
> > Can I take that document and reliably implement N3?
> 
> Try it. Who knows? ;-)

My view is that the document is horribly inadequate as a specification
of N3 as a representation language.

> > Perhaps I could
> > implement a tool that takes an N3 document and produces a related RDF
> > graph although I'm doubtful of even that.
> 
> I would imagine that depends which constructs of N3 are used. (I
> believe in general you'd get multiple graphs + rules)

Oh?  This is a bit surprising.  I had thought that an N3 document could
be processed into a single RDF graph.  I would be interested to see
where the multiplicity comes from.

> > However, I believe that there
> > is no chance that I (or anyone else) could use solely that document to
> > implement reliable reasoning in N3 or to develop a formal meaning for
> > N3.
> 
> I've not spent much time with N3 proper, but it does strike me as
> worthwhile exploration. Also I hate to have to contradict you, but I'm
> sure you personally could develop a formal meaning for N3 (i.e. fill
> in the blanks), and I've no doubt the creators of N3 would be grateful
> for it to appear in the next rev of the spec.

Nope, I actually wouldn't know where to end, or even, really, to begin.  

Of course, I *could* implement something that might look a bit like N3,
if I made a whole bunch of assumptions about the logical underpinning of
N3.  But that is not the way things should work.  The N3 document should
provide these underpinnings to me.

> But Michael, Phil, Peter, whoever started this thread - is there any
> particular reason you need N3 over the Turtle subset (plus maybe
> SPARQL's notion of named graphs)?
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/

Who knows?  Not I.  I didn't start the thread, I was just responding to
the claim by Phil Archer in 
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Sep/0001.html
that N3 is "fully specified and understood".

> Cheers,
> Danny.

peter

Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2008 17:15:20 UTC