- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:23:45 +0100
- To: <conrad.bock@nist.gov>
- Cc: "'public-owl-wg Group WG'" <public-owl-wg@w3.org>, "'Peter Haase'" <haase@fzi.de>, "'Boris Motik'" <boris.motik@comlab.ox.ac.uk>
On 31 Jul 2008, at 17:35, Conrad Bock wrote: > Bijan, > >> I don't see any part that's *not*. Where do you see it not being? > > I asked first. :) I answered: All of it usefully generalizes, afaict, over the current concrete syntaxes. > You said "some flavor of the current metbamodel > does, in fact, usefully generalize over all the concrete syntaxes I've > seen". What flavor is that? The current flavor. I'm genuinely confused. I can look at a diagram and see how it corresponds to the functional syntax and the xml syntax and the manchester syntax and the rdf syntax without too much difficulty. >> We use the conceptual model *everywhere*. > > Not sure what a conceptual model is. I mean the basic organization of the metamodel (e.g., axioms, expressions, etc.) Just look at the table of contents. > I'm referring to a metamodel for > the W3C abstract syntax that's in the syntax document. Yes. And it's organized a certain way. >> Yes, if sufficiently important user groups rebel at what we do enough >> we should change what we do or point them to where others are doing >> what they want to do. Is that the case here? > > I would say yes, if you want to address users that look at the > interchange format. I don't know what you're saying "yes" to, esp. given the conditional. I think the diagrams will be helpful to people working with RDF/XML, at least when I'm teaching them. But if you just observe how people write stuff in RDF/XML for OWL you can see the syntactic patterns. > It seems like tney would be a large proportion of > the people looking at any textual syntax. Conrad, pointing to specific problems would be more helpful to me than this sort of abstract speculation. I even pointed to some cases where one *might* think the metamodel should diverge between RDF syntax and other ones (i.e., one might want to have a notion of triples) and argued that we *shouldn't* do that divergence. Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Thursday, 31 July 2008 17:41:36 UTC