Re: ISSUE-94 (n-ary constucts and RDF): Problem with roundtripping when going from functional-style syntax into RDF and back

On 29 Jan 2008, at 14:28, Bijan Parsia wrote:

>
> On 29 Jan 2008, at 14:12, Ivan Herman wrote:
>
>> Well... You might think that the issue is only for complicated  
>> URIs like http://a.b.c/?qqq&www (which may indeed be a  
>> pathological case for a property name) but it is not. We (ie, W3C)  
>> had long discussions in the past few months with IPTC[1] who, for  
>> historical reasons, have a bunch of URI-s of the form http://a.b.c/ 
>> 123 (ie, with numerals at the end of the URI string), but they  
>> would like to use RDF & co for, eg, their definition of NewsML[2].  
>> Ie, they may have very good reasons to use property names of this  
>> form in an ontology.
>>
>> Ie: I would be cautious in introducing such restriction...
>
> I concur,

Still seems bizarre to me that our syntax spec doesn't specify names  
in a way that ensures that they can be written down using the  
standard concrete syntax -- or, looked at the other way round, that  
the standard concrete syntax doesn't allow us to write down all legal  
names. But what do I know.

> though I still don't quite understand the "If we can't trip, thus  
> can't roundtrip, thus we shouldn't try to roundtrip" argument. Is  
> anyone advocating it that forcefully?

This argument doesn't make sense to me either. Clearly the above  
problem (with RDF/XML) is considered to be some kind of corner case,  
and the expectation is that ontologies can be "tripped", i.e.,  
serialised in RDF/XML. In this case, it doesn't seem unreasonable to  
consider round tripping.

>
> However, I would say that roundtripping is good and valuable and we  
> should aim for it as much as is sensible when balanced against  
> other considerations.
>
> Even if you never lay eyes on some functional syntax, it is the  
> case that the functional syntax/metamodel make a very nice abstract  
> interface that is used in the OWL API (for example) and manifests  
> in other syntaxes (see the OWLED CNL task force) and user interfaces.

This is, I believe, the primary motivation for round-tripping.

>
> (And, as I've said long ago, I wouldn't mind tightening some of the  
> serialization requirements in the RDF/XML (i.e., order of axioms,  
> etc.) In fact, I think that's highly desirable.)

Doe this impact on round tripping?

Ian


>
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 14:43:11 UTC