RE: normative and non-normative references

Hi Bijan!

>-----Original Message-----
>From: public-owl-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-owl-wg-request@w3.org]
>On Behalf Of Bijan Parsia
>Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 1:05 PM
>To: Bijan Parsia
>Cc: Michael Schneider; Bijan Parsia; Ian Horrocks; W3C OWL Working
>Group; Peter F. Patel-Schneider
>Subject: Re: normative and non-normative references
>
>To be clear, I don't want to force the issue. For some of our other
>documents, there are clear non-normative references. I.e., references
>that could be dropped without affecting the reading of the spec text
>itself or the design of the language. 

Ok, then my problem was with the term "normative" (as in the statement: "the
set of semantic conditions in section 5 are normative, while the
comprehension conditions in section 7 are not".). 

What you are talking about here seems more of the kind that the document
/depends/ in some form on the reference. The "SROIQ paper" example in your
other mail is a good example for this, and so are many of the
"non-normative" examples in the RDF Semantics:

  <http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/#nonnormative>

(The RDF Semantics refers to the OWL Reference, for example. :-))

>It helps to mark those clearly, in my experience.
>
>If you do not feel that there are any such references in your
>document, then omitting the label is fine, IMHO. You think people
>cannot discard any of the references and that's the default for me
>when reading a spec (i.e., I presume its design or spec text
>significant unless marked non-normative or informative).
>
>If you, upon reflection, think that some of your references are so
>discardable, or want to include a reference to something for
>illustration or further reading purposes (which I don't think is a
>bad idea), then you should have an informative references section.

Ok, it was from the beginning my intention to only have references in the
RDF-Based Semantics, which cannot easily be removed. But I've done the check
below, just for the record (YOU DO NOT NEED TO READ THIS LIST). 

The outcome has been that, AFAICT, all current references in the RDF-Based
Semantics seem "normative" in the sense that the document depends on them.
And I also do not plan to add links to work on which the document does not
depend. 

So an explicit distinction will not be necessary, and therefore I prefer not
to make it.

Cheers,
Michael

Analysis:

* [CURIE]: Every CURIE is substitutable by a full-blown IRI, but this would
massively change the document (contains several hundred CURIEs), and would
make it virtually unreadable (if it wasn't anyway ;-)).  

* [OWL 2 Direct Semantics], [OWL 2 RDF Mapping]: These actually do not occur
in any normative context, but the (informative) correspondence theorem and
the whole discussion around it strongly depends on these documents. Removing
them would kill a whole section (at least).

* [OWL 1 Full]. :-) Ok, this would also kill a whole section, namely that
comparing OWL 2 Full with the old spec. And the very first paragraph in the
intro says that this document is meant to replace the old spec.

* [RDF Concepts], [RDF Semantics]: If any ref is normative for the OWL 2
Full spec, then those (defines syntax and base semantics).

* [RDF Text]: I normatively refer to it in the "Vocabulary" section, when
listing the "OWL 2 Full datatypes": """The meaning of rdf:text is described
in [RDF:TEXT].""" I wonder, whether I could alternatively indirectly refer
to it by referring to the Structural Spec (I do this for the other
datatypes). But as long as I am in doubt, I keep it in, because this will
not hurt.

* [RFC 2119]: I think we all see this as a "normative" reference. 

* [RFC 3987] (IRI) vs. [RFC 2396] (old URI): Clearly, the newer IRI spec is
normative, and it obsoletes the old URI spec. The problem is that [RFC 2396]
was normative in the RDF Semantics, and I dedicate a normative paragraph of
the RDF Based Semantics (in section 2.1) to explicitly say that [RFC 3987]
is used instead of [RFC 2396] in the OWL 2 Full spec. So I can hardly drop
it.

--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
Research Scientist, Dept. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
Tel  : +49-721-9654-726
Fax  : +49-721-9654-727
Email: michael.schneider@fzi.de
WWW  : http://www.fzi.de/michael.schneider
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