- From: Conrad Bock <conrad.bock@nist.gov>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:59:21 -0400
- To: "'Bijan Parsia'" <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Cc: "'Peter Haase'" <haase@fzi.de>, "'Boris Motik'" <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk>, <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
Bijan, > > Most people who look at textual syntaxes at all will be looking at > > RDF/XML, because it is file format output from graphical tools. > Perhaps. I wouldn't be surprised if Manchester syntax was more common > if only because of its place in protege 4 and topbraid composer. Will be interesting to see. > > They will expect a metamodel reflecting that. > This is a big leap. Most people who look at textual syntaxes don't > think about metamodels at all :) Should have said "if they use a metamodel, the will expect ..." > > I can see how a metamodel oriented towards "DL" or W3C abstract > > syntax would be useful for a limited audience, but not the majority > > of OWL users. > Au contraire. The RDF syntax *does* reflect the DL/functional syntax > to a large extent. Just consider trying to read a simple class axiom > in ntriples as oppose to a nicely framey RDF/XML version. It's > obvious that the triple level version of expressions is *not* what > most people think in terms in. It's not helpful *at all*. > I think that some flavor of the current metamodel does, in fact, > usefully generalize over all the concrete syntaxes I've seen > proposed. As such, it's *really useful* as a common conceptual > framework. Can you identify the portions of the current metamodel that would be common across all the concrete syntaxes available? > If we proliferate metamodels, then we raise the cost of concrete > syntaxes considerably. Fewer metamodels is better than more, and of course we should continue trying to do that, but it's better to have more if important user groups refuse to use the few we think they should. Conrad
Received on Thursday, 31 July 2008 16:00:21 UTC