Re: [RIF] homework for 10/17 telecon (RIF core syntax)

On Fri, 2006-10-13 at 13:14 -0400, Christopher Welty wrote:
> All,
> 
> We expect to spend the bulk of the next telecon discussing the technical 
> proposal [http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/CORE], especially the 
> syntax.  

I'm not sure which syntax you mean. I see
  "A human-oriented syntax, an XML syntax, and the semantics of the
condition language and of the rule language are given."

That's 4 syntaxes, I guess. And the details of them seem to
be spread around several wiki topics.

The first grammar rule I see on
http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/A.1_Basis%253A_Positive_Conditions

is
   Con      ::= entity

which I don't understand. What does "entity" mean?

What's the alphabet of this grammar?

I could perhaps disregard the "human-oriented syntax"
(which I would call programmer-oriented syntax, since most
humans can't read it) but I don't see how the XML
syntax for "entity" is specified.

I'm confused by "The non-terminals in all-upercase such as CONDIT become
XML entities, which act like macros and will not be visible in instance
markups."

The standard definition of "XML entity" is...

[Definition: An XML document may consist of one or many storage units.
These are called entities; they all have content and are all (except for
the document entity and the external DTD subset) identified by entity
name.]
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#dt-entity

I don't think that's what is meant, so I suggest using a different term,
but I'm not sure what term to suggest, since I don't understand what
is intended.


> To prepare, please try to use the XML syntax to encode some rules.  If you 
> find you need something that is not in the syntax, please note it and be 
> prepared to discuss it.

Encoding of integers.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rif-wg/2006Sep/0071.html

>   If the syntax is acceptable (it has been there 
> for some time), we will decide at this telecon to accept it as our syntax.

I find the XML syntax nearly acceptable, modulo issues about
encoding integers, datatyped literals, and language information.

If the WG is going to adopt a "human-readable" syntax, I'll ask
to consider something closer to SPARQL.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 13 October 2006 17:48:00 UTC