Syntaxes of the mapping language

Hello,

The WG charter contains the following in the scope definition:

"The mapping language SHOULD have a human-readable syntax as well as XML and RDF representations of the syntax for purposes of discovery and machine generation."

In my opinion this is way too many representations (given that RDF itself has dozens of syntaxes already) which will be a huge burden on the implementors.

I think OWL 2 has way too many representations already just so everyone gets their own preferred way of doing things - at the cost of OWL implementations which have to support as many syntaxes as possible in order to be able to parse ontologies found on the Web. For SPARQL it is similar, there are many representations of the query results. The reason here though is to make implementations of *consumers* easier because you can use technology available in the browsers for creating mash-ups and don't have to care about the Semantic Web background too much.

The question is then: how and where will the mapping language be used? Is it for server-side tools only which have access to the database and do the transformation to RDF? Or is there any use-case where you want to publish the mappings on the Web and client applications can retrieve them and do something cool with them?

I'd settle for one syntax/representation only. If you make it RDF you get nice interoperability with the rest of the Semantic Web toolchain but is that really needed? Depends on the use-cases. And working with RDF is not always easy because it's so unrestricted. Having a human-readable syntax is a good goal but that doesn't exclude XML. If it's a well-designed syntax (bad example: XSLT ;-) ) people can work with it easily enough - they're used to XML for all sorts of configuration files and you have excellent tool support for it.

And then of course you have to look at the existing stuff. But I'd rather you come up with something new than introduce too much variety.

Thanks,
  Simon

Received on Thursday, 17 September 2009 12:07:02 UTC