RE: OWL "Sydney Syntax", structured english

>-----Original Message-----
>From: public-owl-dev-request@w3.org
>[mailto:public-owl-dev-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Kaarel Kaljurand
>Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:58 AM
>To: Dan Connolly
>Cc: Anne Cregan; public-owl-dev@w3.org
>Subject: Re: OWL "Sydney Syntax", structured english
>
<snip/>
>No, the expectation is that every propertyname is a transitive English
>verb, rather than a noun. There are studies that seem to indicate that
>this is the case in reality, see e.g.:
> http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~cmellish/papers/kbs05.pdf
<snip/>

Hmm.

While I personally and professionally support the aims of a structured english
syntax, I am wondering when the RDF community will align their practices with
those of XML standards communities, which seem 100% to eschew the use of verbs
as property-names.  The UN/CEFACT naming standards for instance, use nouns in
all cases.  My concern is that this community's singular use of verbs, whether
compounded with nouns or not, continues to unnecessarily alienate the rest of
the development world.  To me, this is a topic that needs to be addressed by the
W3C because it was RDF's original specifications which started this truly
onerous practice without a shred of rationale.  And the paper cited above hardly
finds that a standard practice exists for naming RDF properties  --  gee, both
RDF and OWL themselves even have issues in this regard!

John McClure

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2006 18:20:05 UTC