- From: Christian de Sainte Marie <csma@ilog.fr>
- Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:19:15 +0100
- To: Dave Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- CC: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, public-rif-wg@w3.org
Dave Reynolds wrote: > > Sandro Hawke wrote: > >> Thinking more about the abstract syntax question, I find myself >> wondering how an abstract syntax is really different from an ontology. >> Is there any practical difference between an ontology of Horn rules and >> an abstract syntax for Horn rules? > > > One possible difference is that in an abstract syntax you can say > whether ordering is significant or not. Sure, as you argue, one benefit > is that you can say "ordering is not significant here" but you can also > (at least in ASN.1) say "ordering *is* significant here". Or perhaps > that is just a feature of ASN.1 rather than of abstract syntax notations > in general. > > However, I think an ontology is closer to want we actually want for RIF > and the only places we need to preserve order (e.g. in function/relation > arguments) can be handled in an ontology. What I read, here (and that was already my impression before), is that UML would be even better than OWL (except for not being a W3C standard, of course :-) What are the drawbacks of UML (apart from the ones we already discussed: interchange within the WG, but that is just a question of agreeing on a format; and not everybody being familiar, but that is true of OWL too, isn't it?)? A plus for UML could be that implementors might be more likely to know it. Christian
Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 15:22:34 UTC