Re: [Impr] Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax

From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
Subject: [Impr] Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:49:45 +0100

> [I'm confining my comments to document issues, mostly]
> 
> 1) The first issue I have is that I don't understand the relation  
> between this document, esp. its UML diagrams and the MOF-Based  
> Metamodel document. In general, I'm not exactly sure what is gained  
> overall from having both UML and a grammar. I believe that the UML  
> represents some aspects not available in the grammar e.g., setness of  
> some constructs:
> 
> 	dataOneOf := 'DataOneOf' '(' constant { constant } ')'
> 
> doesn't express that the arguments form a set (that is, neither the  
> unorderedness nor the lack of duplicates is captured by the  
> production), yet the UML diagram does express that.

[...]

I also have some issues with the UML diagrams.  Although the UML
diagrams provide some information as to unordered arguments to
constructors, the UML set tag does not show which sorts of mixed
reorderings are allowed (e.g., allowing interspersed annotations and
axioms in an ontology construct).  It seems to me that the role of the
UML <<set>> tags could be better provided by an upgraded BNF grammar or
a true abstract syntax, where the constructors took sets, or bags, or
sequences of possible mixed subconstructs.  

> Cheers,
> Bijan.

Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2007 17:02:51 UTC