Re: What is added by functional syntax?

On 13 Aug 2008, at 17:05, Jim Hendler wrote:

> Ivan is right, I was confusing two issues - what syntaxes are  
> needed in the "formal" documents and what is being included in the  
> primer/guide.  It is with respect to the latter that I was worried  
> about confusion, but the guide doesn't include the metamodel stuff  
> (I assume there is some reason why the guide should include the  
> functional syntax - although I'm not sure what it is -- might  
> simplify the guide to take it out, since the guide is aimed at  
> users and the functional syntax at implementors, if I understood  
> early mails in this group right)

There's no WG decision on which syntaxes to include and probably  
won't be as I consider it editorial.

The original syntaxes are there because a) I wanted to have several  
syntaxes in a draft to demonstate and experiment with the multiple  
syntax facility and I started with manchester syntax because it was  
easy to paste back and forth from protege. Functional syntax was easy  
to transliterate to and XML syntax was trivial from Functional. I'm  
working on a script that makes it all automatic so it'll be less work  
next time to add or remove arbitrary syntaxes.

I personally think functional syntax should be in there to help  
people who are going to read the other specs. Even a naive user might  
want to learn more and having it available (though, not the default  
one) is helpful.

Manchester syntax is necessary, I think, both to accommodate protege  
and topbraid users but also because it works better in screen readers  
(as it was partly designed by Robert Stevens for just this purpose).

I see no reason not to include the other "exchange" syntaxes and  
Turtle. I'm considering whether to include DL syntax and FOL syntax  
as somewhat more hidden options.

Obviously, this many can only work if they don't overwhelm the UI (in  
which cases choices will have to be made), but I'm pretty confident  
that it won't, done right.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 19 August 2008 18:31:38 UTC