RIF CORE syntax diagrams

RIFWG,

Our 5th F2F meeting ended Wednesday.  A couple outcomes and news items 
you should be aware of will follow in subsequent messages.

One of the biggest sources of confusion regarding the CORE spec was 
the way in which the UML diagrams were being interpreted.  The fact 
that some people wanted to call them MOF Metamodels, some an Abstract 
Syntax, and some an ontology (when these are really three different 
things) concerned me from the start, and these different perspectives 
made for a real breakdown in communication, as no one seemed to 
understand what anyone else meant.  In the end, we resolved the 
confusion as follows:

The UML diagrams are NOT metamodels nor ontologies.  This does not 
preclude us from doing a RIF CORE metamodel, or an ontology of rule 
languages, but the UML diagrams Sandro has sent around are generated 
automatically from the asn06 syntax, such that a subclass relation is 
really a syntactic "or" and the aggregation relation is really a 
syntactic concatenation.  We resolved to call these diagrams what they 
are: "graphical views of the asn06 syntax using UML notation."

These diagrams will appear in the 1st CORE WD as such.

-CC&S

-- 
Dr. Christopher A. Welty                    IBM Watson Research Center
+1.914.784.7055                             19 Skyline Dr.
cawelty@gmail.com                           Hawthorne, NY 10532
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty

Received on Friday, 2 March 2007 23:35:16 UTC