Re: [TED] An alternative proposal for the technical design

Dear Christian,

allow me to ask for some clarifications concerning your proposal.

 > Christian de Sainte Marie wrote:

With or without chair hat? ;-)

> ([TED] stands for TEchnical Design)
> 
> I have hinted and ranted and hoped that somebody would come forward with 
> a counter-proposal to Harold's et al, 

Frankly spoken, allow me to ask a simple question: What is the 
convincing argument why we nees such a counter-proposal?

> and, indeed, some came. But none
> of the kind that I hoped for. So, I took "mon courage a deux mains" and 
> my limited competence in the other, and I tried it myself...
> 
> You will find the result on the Wiki: 
> http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Alternative_Extensible_Design
> 
> Do not hesitate to ask if something is not clear (or, should I say: do 
> not hesitate to ask? :-)
> 
> Christian

Conjunctions and dijunctions cannot be distinguished in your BNF, 
neither can Existential and Universal quantification, Modifiers are not 
defined? So, frankly, I am not sure how to understand this grammar.

What I want to say, admittedly, is that this appears to me rather than a 
step back than forward.

I would like to have a convincing argument why we should make such a 
step back, as it seems that Harold et al.'s proposal is, at least 
syntactically, a) a going in a similar direction which is in a more 
elaborate state, b) is probably the most mature part of the RIF work so far.

Or formulating it more positively, can they key essence of the novelty 
of your proposal be made compatible with Harold et al.'s syntax 
proposal? If yes, great, if no, why not?

As for semantics, the charter explicitly says that we want to start with 
the following:
"The Phase 1 rule semantics will be essentially Horn Logic, a 
well-studied sublanguage of First-Order Logic which is the basis of 
Logic Programming."

So, the charter obligates us to define a semantics for the phase 1 
language. Your statement is clearly waeker wrt. phase 1:

"My rule of the thumb for what belongs in phase 1 and what does not, is 
whether it is controversial or not, subject to time constraints and the 
part of RIF core defined in phase 1 being at least expressive enough to 
interchange Horn rules (aka the minimum usefulness criterion)."

In this sense, I have the vague feeling that your proposal deviates from 
what is the declared scope of phase 1 in section 2.2. of the charter, 
but I might just have misunderstood your proposal, equally possible. If 
not, we would need strong and convincing arguments why to change this 
declared scope.

Thanks for clarification,
axel

-- 
Dr. Axel Polleres
email: axel@polleres.net  url: http://www.polleres.net/

Received on Saturday, 28 October 2006 10:55:14 UTC