A proposal for addressing LC comment 58 (fully typed functional-style syntax)

Hello,

The Last Call comment 58 by Matthew Horridge asks us to change the
functional-style syntax back to the earlier state, where it was fully typed.
Thus, instead of the current class expression

SomeValuesFrom( a:P a:C )

we would have the class expression

ObjectSomeValuesFrom( a:P a:C ).

This change would not affect in any way any of the other syntaxes, OWL/RDF
included. The main rationale behind the change is to make functional-style
syntax documents easier to parse.

I actually sympathize with this comment. After the second F2F when we decided
that we don't want strong typing in OWL/RDF, I rather arbitrarily decided to
change the functional-style syntax as well. As Matthew's comment shows, however,
this had rather unfortunate effects.

We can address this comment by changing the functional-style syntax to the
earlier state and make it fully typed. Since the primary syntax of OWL 2 is
OWL/RDF, and this syntax would not change in any way, I don't think that this
would be a problematic change. Let me know how you feel about it. If everyone
agrees, I shall draft a response to Matthew along these lines.

Regards,

	Boris

Received on Thursday, 19 February 2009 20:10:57 UTC