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

Axel Polleres wrote:
> 
> allow me to ask for some clarifications concerning your proposal.
> 
>  > Christian de Sainte Marie wrote:
> 
> With or without chair hat? ;-)

Without, I guess. And I guess I should have been axplicit about that: I 
apologize for any inconvenience.

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

I wanted to make sure that an approach to designing RIF that some think 
is both different and viable has been given fair and serious 
consideration before we make a decision.

> 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.

It seems like I should have avoided including that part, as my main 
point was not the syntax :-)

I did not really mean to specify an alternative to Harold's et al. 
syntax: I mostly wanted to abstract from its (LP) overloaded terminology 
and I had to define my own in some way. Doing so, I tried to do it in a 
way that made it extensible: hence the "modifier", which is an obvious 
extension point at this stage (with, at least, all kind of negations 
pending).

This being said, I do not understand your point: 
conjunction/disjunction, resp. existential/universal, are distinguished 
by saying which one is which one; I just wanted to make clear that, 
indeed, they cannot be distinguished from their constitutive components 
alone.

> 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?

Syntax? probably yes. The philosophy is different.

> 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:

I do not think so: the charter mandates us to specify, in phase 1, a RIF 
that enables interchanging Horn rules. This is an objective. How we 
achieve that objective is a solution, and the charter does not mandate a 
solution.

> Thanks for clarification,

I hope this helps...

Christian

Received on Tuesday, 31 October 2006 15:24:45 UTC