Re: struggling to understand conformance in POWDER formal semantics

Dan,

Thanks for taking time to review our documents. I'll work through your 
comments, starting with this one.

Dan Connolly wrote:
> I'm puzzled by this...
> 
> "Conformance with this document means that Description Resources may be
> transformed from POWDER to POWDER-BASE to POWDER-S as set out below
> without any change to their semantics. When querying or inferring from
> the RDF/OWL graph, conformant implementations of this document will also
> implement the semantic extension defined below."
>  -- http://www.w3.org/TR/powder-formal/#conformancestatement
> 
> What product classes are being defined here?
> I see "conformant implementations" but I don't really see
> a definition of the form
> 
>   A conforming POWDER implementation is ...
> 
> as I'd expect.

Yes this is tricky as what the formal doc defines is:
1. The semantic extension
2. The transformation through the 3 species of POWDER.

Also, for various reasons (some historical, some practical), 'POWDER' is 
defined in 3 separate documents so we can't say "A conforming POWDER 
implementation is ..." in this document. We do say something similar in 
the definition of a POWDER Processor, however [1].

OK, but taking your comment on board, how about:

"A conformant implementation of this Recommendation will transform 
POWDER to POWDER-BASE to POWDER-S as set out below without any change to 
the semantics at each stage. When querying or inferring from a POWDER-S 
document (an RDF/OWL graph), conformant implementations of this document 
will also implement the semantic extension defined in Section 4.3."


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-powder-dr-20081114/#conformance

> I'd also expect to see something about conformance of documents,
> though perhaps that's in one of the other documents? In which
> case a cross-reference seems in order.

Agreed. So I'll add to the previous sentence: A separate conformance 
statement relating to POWDER and POWDER-S documents is given in Section 
2.9 of the the Description Resources document [@ref].

OK with you?

Phil.

-- 

Phil Archer
w. http://philarcher.org/

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 16:35:39 UTC