Re: GRDDL spec ready for release? (informative mechanical rules)

On Fri, 2007-02-02 at 13:22 -0500, Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:
> > Thanks so much for all the hard work on the Spec! I'd like at least one
> > more reviewer besides Ron to give a good read before we release it as a
> > Last Call.
> 
> I'll volunteer to help review the spec.  I'll try to focus on the 
> informative mechanical rules, ...

Any progress?

On my side, I'm thinking about splitting the "mechanical rules" appendix
to a separate file. Right now I have the first 34 steps of a proof
sorta cleaned up; maybe we can walk thru it in tomorrow's telcon...
or maybe some other time...
  http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec_rules.html
  revision 1.1 date: 2007/02/07 00:54:09

>  as I have a concern that there isn't much 
> precedent in using rules to express the processing mechanics of a 
> specification

Sure there is... relaxNG, XQuery formal semantics, just to
name a couple off the top of my head.

>  as well as the informal dependencies on the vocabularies 
> used in the rules (the log:* properties in particular as well as 
> rdfsyn:*).
> 
> The appendix to the mechanical rules has @@explain TODO's 
> regarding the vocabularies which are not 'formal', and I think these need 
> to be very explicit about what the semantics of these terms are.

I'd like them to be reasonably clear, but I wonder what "need" you see.

>   The fact 
> that the rules rely on generating function symbols makes the underlying KR 
> quite expressive and perhaps not aligned with the target KR of the 'sanctioned'
> semantic web rule language (RIF) - which is still a work in progress.
>
> log:uri and log:includes in particular are quite cryptic in their formal 
> semantics - at least from what I know of what those terms are meant to 
> mean.

log:uri is just like 'name' from KIF, and
log:includes is just rdf simple entailment.

> Though the rules are informative, they have the nice advantage that they 
> are 'complete' in the sense that proofs can be generated to determine 
> GRDDL compliance.  The bar for the average GRDDL implementor becomes 
> significantly higher if they intend to interpret the rules in any formal 
> way, and I think at the very least we should be sure that the specificatin 
> is as clear as it can be (given the fact that we still don't have a 
> 'sanctioned' SW rule language) about such an interpretation.

By all means, send any clarifications you can think of.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Wednesday, 7 February 2007 01:03:39 UTC