Re: What is added by functional syntax?

so let me ask Alan's question a little differently -- coming out of  
this WG will be the functional syntax, the Manchester syntax, and the  
metamodel (not to mention the XML syntax) -- can we justify all of  
these, and if so, should we not more include discussion of  the  
differences and issues in the documents -- personally, I don't care  
which we use, but having many without clear justification is likely to  
create confusion -- and I think more confusion is certain to hurt OWL  
adoption (having 3 subsets was used by many people as an excuse to  
avoid moving to OWL, now we have multiple profiles and multiple  
syntaxes -- so we should be as clear as possible as to the differences  
and uses)
  -JH


On Aug 12, 2008, at 5:33 PM, Boris Motik wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I wouldn't say that all people don't like the functional syntax;  
> however, let's not argue about this point.
>
> One of the reasons why we have the functional syntax is that it  
> provides us with a way to define tables in the RDF Mapping and the
> Semantics. You can't really put diagrams in these tables (or, better  
> said, one could do that, but I'm not going to do that :-). The
> functional-style syntax lends itself well for such purposes because  
> it is reasonable concise while being at least to some degree
> human-readable.
>
> Thus, the functional-style syntax adds only some pragmatics to the  
> spec. It does not add anything to the language from the
> definition/structural point of view.
>
> Regards,
>
> 	Boris
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: public-owl-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-wg-request@w3.org 
>> ] On Behalf Of Alan Ruttenberg
>> Sent: 13 August 2008 04:13
>> To: OWL 1.1
>> Subject: What is added by functional syntax?
>>
>>
>> Hypothetically, if we had only had the object/metamodel, and
>> documented the global restrictions on axioms in terms of the
>> metamodel, what  would we lose (other than a syntax that not many are
>> likely to use).
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -Alan
>>
>
>
>

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would  
it?." - Albert Einstein

Prof James Hendler				http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler
Tetherless World Constellation Chair
Computer Science Dept
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY 12180

Received on Wednesday, 13 August 2008 00:06:19 UTC