- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 15:24:35 -0800
- To: Pascal Hitzler <hitzler@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de>
- Cc: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>, Uli Sattler <Ulrike.Sattler@manchester.ac.uk>, Hassan Aït-Kaci <hak@ilog.com>, Enrico Franconi <franconi@inf.unibz.it>, public-rif-wg@w3.org
On Dec 9, 2005, at 11:52 AM, Pascal Hitzler wrote: > Hassan, > > I very much apprechiate your point - the term "formal semantics" is > easily interpreted in too narrow a sense. But let me just add (and > emphasize, as I assume that you agree with me on this) that procedural > semantics alone is not satisfactory for a semantic web context, as it > usually binds a language to a specific engine, and is thus not in the > spirit of interoperability and interchange. That's a bit strong, isn't it? I'm not sure if you meant there to be a nuance with "procedural" vs. "operational" semantics, but in programming theory, an operational semantics works by describing the behavior of an abstract machine at varying levels of granuality, sometimes at quite a high level. So, there is a sense that this "binds" the language to a specific (abstract) engine, but you can show equivalence of various abstract machines (at some level of granularity). Maybe to bring it back to the more familiar, you can show the equivalence of two proof theories (e.g., that they validate the same theorems and lets assume a deduction theorem) without detouring through a semantics. (Or to make it simpler...and operational semantics that was useless for optimization, e.g., for showing that substituting a faster function for a more expensive one in a certain context produced the same actual results, would be a damn poor semantics indeed :)) I don't say it's *appealing*, but it can be made to work. And sometimes it is appealing :) Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Friday, 9 December 2005 23:24:44 UTC