Re: LC: Opposing OWL/XML format

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 27 Jan 2009, at 15:50, Jonathan Rees wrote:
>
>> On Jan 27, 2009, at 4:55 AM, Bijan Parsia wrote:
>>
>>>> GRDDL... well, if we had a 'standard' mapping from OWL/XML to RDF/XML
>>>> via a GRDDL transformation then this could be a very good argument here
>>>> in favour of OWL/XML. And we may have that, right?:-)
>>>
>>> Well, I think we do already :) But if you mean an XSLT, then we can do
>>> the wrapper thing quickly. Rees indicated that that wasn't acceptable!
>>>
>>> Verra strange.
>
> I thought of some specific questions:
>
> 1) If there exists a public domain/open source XSLT translator, does that
> assuage your worry (even if not produced/endorse/published by the working
> group)?

Yes, if the proposed XSLT has no other complications, such as reference
to a CGI script.

This is not an if; as I said XSLT is ubiquitous. There are many.

Frank may be of a different opinion. I'm looking for compromises that
might make you both happy.

> 2) If there were (counterfactually again) an OWL/XML to triples parser for
> every known RDF or OWL toolkit, would you be happy even if there was no
> XSLT?

This is not the situation I'm talking about, so no, this would be irrelevant.

> 3) If there were an XSLT published by the working group, would you be
> satisfied even if it were not (easily) downloadable from the namespace page?

This sounds like a trick question. I think the answer is yes, but I
can't imagine why
under normal conditions it couldn't be downloadable. You get it when the
server can give it to you (just as you get the OWL 2 recommendations), and use
a cached or mirrored version if for whatever reason you need to.

> 4) Do you prefer a frozen, perhaps buggy published XSLT or a "fragile" XSLT
> which connects to (several) web services and are maintained? (Note that
> several HTML editors connect to the W3Cs HTML validator to provide
> validation.) (I'm not saying that these are the only options. Just asking
> which of these two you prefer.)

Also sounds like a trick question, but given this foul choice, I'd say
the buggy one.
(This is why I suggested it be nonnormative.)
Bugs can be fixed in a decentralized way, and for something
this straightforward it should be clear how to do so; but servers
can't be conjured from nothing, and *their* behavior  is completely
unbankable.

I could ask you the same question about your nominally normative
XML schema. What if you find a bug in it, where it is inconsistent with
something said elsewhere in the OWL 2 recommendation? Would this
possibility mean you'd want to suppress the schema from the rec,
and instead refer readers to a schema-providing server or service?
I would have said: Here is the requirement on the schema, the requirement
is normative, and to the best of our knowledge the following schema
meets it, but like everyone else we're fallible, so we have to say this
schema is only informative.

> Cheers,
> Bijan.

I'm sorry but I won't be able to continue this conversation from here,
as parrying with you is always very time consuming. I look forward to
hearing the
WG's response to Frank's public comment and may be able to take the subject
up again at that time.

Best
Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 14:35:36 UTC