Re: How would option b) on the last straw poll of 12 March work?

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I am of the opinion that formalisms must be used in most cases of defining a
language or system, and that the core of a specification is via the
formalism alone.

It is certainly possible to produce documents that are much less formal but
that effectively describe a language or system, and such user guides
generally end up being used by more people than specification documents do.
 My view, however, is that these user guides generally cannot take the place
of specification documents.

peter



On 03/14/2015 12:07 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Peter, I definitely didn't say "natural language alone." In fact, I said
> the opposite:
> 
> If
>>> there are formalisms that must be used, they should exist in addition
>>> to natural language descriptions.
> 
> I also am pretty darn sure that not many people who approach standards 
> documents actually read and understand the formalisms. I want to make
> sure that bright, tech-savvy folks of many backgrounds can understand the
> standards document. Any formalism used will exclude more readers than the
> English language will. It can't be the heart of what we have to say if we
> hope to communicate widely.
> 
> kc
> 
> On 3/14/15 10:10 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote: I think that natural
> language alone is an extremely poor way to define anything.  It is just
> too easy to misinterpret natural language statements even if the language
> is simplified and stiltified.
> 
> The SPARQL 1.1 query language, for example, has a complex mathematical
> basis provided in http://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/#sparqlDefinition.
> RDF has a model-theoretic definition.
> 
> peter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 03/14/2015 09:55 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 3/14/15 8:46 AM, Irene Polikoff wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> would and should actually read and understand Z semantics or
>>>>> some mathematical axiomatic descriptions, but would find SPARQL
>>>>> more difficult to understand?
>>>> 
>>>> I hope nothing that I have said could be read as support of Z
>>>> semantics or mathematical axiomatic descriptions because I am not
>>>> familiar with either. I prefer that standards be written in clear
>>>> natural language. If there are formalisms that must be used, they
>>>> should exist in addition to natural language descriptions. Many
>>>> standards take this approach. In fact, the only place that I seem
>>>> to have run into (incomprehensible) formalisms is in the OWL
>>>> documentation. Everything else uses natural language (stiltified to
>>>> be precise, perhaps) and examples. Even the SPARQL documentation
>>>> takes this approach, so I don't understand why "formalisms" are
>>>> assumed to be needed for SHACL.
>>>> 
>>>> kc
>>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
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Received on Saturday, 14 March 2015 20:24:21 UTC