Re: pruning the semantics document (and "meaningless terms")

At 09:21 12/12/2002 -0500, Frank Manola wrote:

[...]


>Patrick--
>
>No apology necessary, and I didn't take what you said as a criticism of 
>the Primer itself.  I was just commenting on the fact that the terms were 
>being described as "meaningless", and that hence all the discussion should 
>be removed from the Primer, when much of that same discussion (or 
>descriptions on which such discussion might reasonably be based) appears 
>in normative documents.  I'm not commenting on whether that discussion (or 
>other statements of "intent") appear in normative or non-normative 
>sections of those documents.  We might reasonably have further discussion 
>about those distinctions, and/or about what normative things we intend to 
>say about the vocabulary items in question.
>
>My basic comment, though, is that the Primer has in good faith tried to 
>convey my understanding of what the WG intends those items to mean.  It 
>necessarily elaborates on those things more than some of the other 
>documents partly in order to do its job, and partly due to the deliberate 
>sparseness of description in other documents.  I've commented on that 
>sparseness in the past, and the consensus seemed to have been that that's 
>OK, because the elaboration will go in the Primer.  However if, due to 
>that sparseness in other documents, we're then going to argue that more 
>complete discussion in the Primer should be eliminated, this seems to me 
>to be an unfortunate piece of circular argument, and I'm going to have to 
>insist that more complete discussion get included (or remain) in the other 
>documents.

I think one of the issues we have here is that we are bit behind with the 
vocabulary document and that is leaving a bit of a hole.  In this regard I 
think I am agreeing with some comments Graham made earlier.

I suggest that any normative statements that must be made about vocabulary 
terms, but that are not model theoretic in nature, are made in the 
vocabulary document.

That way, Pat is free to slim down the semantics document.

Please can we just get on and write up the decisions that we have already made.

Brian

Received on Thursday, 12 December 2002 11:50:48 UTC