Re: RIF vs Rule Language

(also in response to Hassans post)

I agree.

There's simply a problem with the term "operational semantics" which 
seems to mean different things in different communities. That's why I 
chose "procedural semantics" which (imho unambiguously) refers to 
algorithmic processing like in a real implementation.

I believe that we don't really have a disagreement.

Best Regards,

Pascal.


Bijan Parsia wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 

-- 
Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe
email: hitzler@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de    fax: +49 721 608 6580
web:   http://www.pascal-hitzler.de   phone: +49 721 608 4751
        http://www.neural-symbolic.org

Received on Saturday, 10 December 2005 00:58:16 UTC