Setting milestones (Re: marathon)

On 04/04/2022 09:40, Miel Vander Sande wrote:
> Hi Jos, all
>
> Thanks for running this marathon; I think we all very much appreciate 
> EYE and the updates that it got because of this.
+42 :-)
> I'm clearly one of the 33 dormant members of this group, mainly 
> because I'm really unqualified to partake in the discussions (I see N3 
> as a tool, unwary of the insides), but may I ask:
> after 42 months, is there a group report in sight? Is there a 
> milestone planned?

That's a fair question, and we acknowledged during the call last week 
that, unfortunately, we are not there yet. Defining a clean definition 
of N3's semantics is getting in the way, and unfortunately eating a lot 
of our bandwidth. I probably have my share of responsibility in that 
latter point, and I apologize for it.

Here is an idea that is maybe silly, but maybe can help us make progress 
: we could focus, for a while, on a strict subset of the N3 language 
(coined e.g. N3-Lite), and try to get a self-sufficient CG report on 
that subset. Then we could try to grow this subset (possibly in several 
incremental steps) until we cover N3 entirely.

The subset I have in mind is the following (but that's open for discussion):

- quoted graphs are disallowed, expect as the head or body of rules
- rules are not encoded as triples, but handled at their own level
- quickvars (?x) are only allowed in rules
- no explicit quantification

I think that defining the semantics of this subset should be relatively 
easy (compared to full N3), and that it could be done in such a way that 
all existing N3 implementation already comply with the semantics.  We 
would therefore have a first level of interoperabilty formally specified.

Focusing on N3-lite, we could also come back to our work on builtins 
(although the most complex ones, such as log:semantics, log:includes, or 
log:forAll would not be part of N3-lite).

I know that this is reminiscent of the different profiles of OWL, which 
some people in this group don't quite like. Maybe to avoid this issue 
could we decide that N3-Lite needs to disappear once N3 "full" is 
properly specified. In any case, I think that N3-Lite could be a useful 
stepping stone.

> And is there anything non-expert community members can do to help?

Hopefully, the discussions on N3-Lite will be more accessible, and allow 
for a wider group to engage. At least, that's one of the goal of this 
proposal.

   pa

>
> Best,
>
> Miel
>
> Op ma 4 apr. 2022 om 02:01 schreef Jos De Roo <josderoo@gmail.com>:
>
>     Hi all,
>
>     This group started about 42 months ago
>     https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-n3-dev/2018Nov/

>     and for me it really feels like a marathon coming to an end.
>     During this past 42 months we had lengthy discussions
>     https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3HAUhjaVnnJ6yVbFAvIBRJQjUY9aFlQ2_bGxkD0mnE/edit

>     and as a result for the eye reasoner there were 244 releases
>     https://github.com/josd/eye/blob/master/RELEASE

>
>     For me what really remains is n3p which is the eye intermediate
>     p-code and from now on
>     I will focus on https://github.com/josd/n3p as a
>     https://knows.idlab.ugent.be/team/ member
>     and stay quiet in this N3 community group like most of the other
>     33 members.
>
>     Thanks and kind regards,
>     Jos
>
>     -- https://josd.github.io

>