RE: GRDDL and OWL/XML

> From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk]
>
> Does this mean you are abandoning your "one semweb" argument? (I ask
> merely for clarification...there's a bazillion and two email to sort
> through :)).

No, it's just that the discussion was sounding unnecessarily combative, and I didn't think more back-and-forth arguing would help.  I *do* think it is important to provide a machine-interpretable GRDDL transformation for OWL/XML so that OWL/XML documents can be readily consumed as RDF.

> . . .
> But, ok, if the conclusion you want me to draw is that GRDDL is
> inappropriate for W3C specs, I guess I reluctantly will draw that.

No, of course that isn't the conclusion I want you to draw.  I'm pointing out that I think it is a misunderstanding of the GRDDL spec to conclude that a GRDDL "transformation" does not need to be machine interpretable, because such a reading would render the spec quite pointless: if a consuming GRDDL-aware application could be expected to know that it should invoke a particular executable when it sees a particular non-machine-interpretable GRDDL "transformation" URI, then it could just as well be expected to know that it should invoke that executable when it sees a particular namespace URI, with no need for GRDDL.  And since the W3C doesn't just turn out specs for fun, I think it's therefore fair to conclude that that is a misunderstanding of the spec.  I think there are passages in the spec that, in *isolation*, can be quite reasonably interpreted that way, but I don't think that reading really stands up when considering the spec as a whole.

> . . . I trust you see why this is not
> generally appealing to those who must shoulder the burden.

Yes, of course it takes work.  But as a bonus I also think that writing such a machine-interpretable transformation would be a very good way to catch errors or ambiguities in the mapping specification.  In fact, the more complex the mapping specification, the more likely it is to contain errors, and the more it would benefit from such an exercise.



David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

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Received on Thursday, 22 May 2008 04:12:15 UTC