- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 11:59:56 +0000
- To: "Michael Schneider" <schneid@fzi.de>
- Cc: "Bijan Parsia" <bparsia@cs.manchester.ac.uk>, "Ian Horrocks" <ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk>, "W3C OWL Working Group" <public-owl-wg@w3.org>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
On 9 Mar 2009, at 10:39, Michael Schneider wrote: [snip] >> If a normative criterion of your spec depends on a reference, then >> the >> reference is normative. > > I disagree. For me, references can never be normative or non-normative > themselves. Who said they were? > Only the context they appear in can be. Normative references are those that appear in a normative contexts. > And since I have tagged > all non-normative parts of the RDF-Based Semantics clearly as such, > I don't > see why I should put additional (redundant!) normativity statements > to the > references list. Because it's very helpful to the reader and not remotely a burden on the author. It is also common practice. > But even if I would agree, I really don't see that such a > separation is easy > to produce in the RDF-Based Semantics. For example, you say: > >> I found some mislabeled refs: >> [OWL 2 Structural Spec] > > (Thanks for this. Will fix them!) [snip] > > And I cannot agree with both of you. I don't see why a disagreement here means that we can't reach some sensible decision. [snip] > So, there seems to be, at least, no obvious line of separation. The existence of judgment calls is no reason to forgo making distinctions. [snip] > But I also have a principle concern: I don't want to play with > normativity > statements without any necessity. I consider changing something from > normative to non-normative to be a change in design. Not saying > anything, > again, will avoid such problems. You aren't changing *anything* from normative to non-normative. You are *labeling* things that were previously unlabeled. > So is there any requirement to do this separation? Does W3C documents > require this? They don't require it, but it is standard practice. I, personally, would interpret your list as saying that *everything* was referenced normatively. Indeed, that's why I defaulted to saying everything is normative. If everything *is* normative, to your mind, great. A clear example of a non-normative reference would be a reference to one of the SROIQ papers. > Otherwise, I don't see why I should change the RDF-Based > Semantics. I need to see a clear reason for this, and I haven't > heard any so > far. Standard practice. Helpful to readers. Avoids the misunderstanding that all the references are normative (and thus *must be read* or conformed to in order to implement the spec). > The current state is perfectly fine for me, and I don't expect anyone > to formally object against /not/ having such a distinction. I'm not so > certain, however, about the other way around... I wouldn't expect an objection either way. Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Monday, 9 March 2009 11:56:22 UTC