Re: OWL Functional Syntax and case sensitivity

On Thu, 3 Mar 2011 21:54:53 -0500
Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:

> They are all case sensitive. Look for the definition of character,
> and how strings are compared and note that terminals are quoted
> strings. 

The terminals are not quoted strings because quoted strings are
(according to section 2.3) enclosed in double quotes. Terminals like
'Ontology' in the BNF are in single quotes, and in actual usage are not
in quotes at all.

Looking around at implementations, the Univ of Manchester syntax
converter has implemented keywords case-sensitively. I can't find it
now but I'm pretty sure I saw a lisp converter that ignored case at
least when reading OWL functional syntax. 

I do think case-sensitivity was intended in the specification, as none
of the examples use case any differently from the canonical case for
each term, but it would be useful to record this explicitly somewhere,
e.g. as an errata.

It's also worth nothing that the "Complete", "Normative" grammar in
section 13 doesn't include comments (i.e. "#..."), though section 2.2
notes that they're allowed.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Sunday, 6 March 2011 10:35:58 UTC