Thought on AS/PS/XS triangle question

So we had a majority in favour of having the whole triangle.

But we have problems agreeing on how to write down that AS and the 
associated mappings. ASN seemed to a reasonable job to me but people had 
problems with it and it is clearly not yet working as a single point of 
maintenance. The aebnf form is rather verbose and baroque and makes the 
spec hard to read.

A suggestion ... based partly on the way OWL 1.1 folks have gone about 
things ...

o Introduce the structure of the language using UML diagrams, OWL 1.1 
call this a "structural model". We include in those diagrams the 
ordering annotations. I would be happy to adopt the <<set>> and <<list>> 
stereotypes that OWL 1.1 use.

o We then provide a presentation syntax that is minimalist, least 
punctuation, clearly close to the structural model. What Michael 
described as 2/3 of the way from the current human readable syntax to 
the aebnf. Let me call it MPS (minimalist presentation syntax) for now.

o We express the semantics in terms of MPS.

o We provide an injective (and thus invertible on the covered set) 
mapping from MPS to XML data. We express this as a simple table of 
structural mappings.

o We also provide an XML Schema such that any XML data generated by the 
mapping will conform to the schema.

o We put in the document that it is our desire to be able to use the 
structural model as a single point of maintenance in the future and 
provide a textual notation for it and mappings between that and both MPS 
and XML. However, doing so in an agreed way is work for the future.

o We get a early sketch of PRD together in a similar style. We use that 
as a concrete example to understand the issues of extensibility, single 
point of maintenance at all that. However, we do that well after the 
next BLD working draft.

This seems to me to keep the spec relatively simple, just one mapping to 
explain. The UML structural model aids understanding and gives a good 
guide to implementers.

I don't want to reopen a mega discussion on this nor do I want to push 
for a compromise that people will later regret. If this approach 
resonates with people great, if not then consider it withdrawn.

Dave
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Received on Friday, 28 September 2007 12:11:58 UTC