Re: BLD: externally defined frames

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:00:37 +0200
Christian de Sainte Marie <csma@ilog.fr> wrote:

> For the remainder of your reply: I have to think about it and try to 
> connect it with my request for clarification. I will come back to you 
> later...

Here is another way to put it.

One should see external frames as another degree of freedom of modeling: it
gives more constructs to enable modeling external sources in more ways,
including as objects, if that is what one wants. Without external frames, one
is *forced* to model external sources as relations, while other (internal)
things in the document might be relations or objects.  This is an unpleasant
and unjustified restriction.

Furthermore, RIF is an exchange language. If language A models some external
sources as objects and BLD only allows external relations, that language A must
do a one-way, non-round-tripable translation.
This is exactly the same argument as what we used for adding frames and other
stuff into the language. If it weren't for round-tripping and the ease of
translation for rich languages, we could have limited everything to just
positional predicates, and BLD would have been 1/2 its current size.


	--michael

Received on Monday, 28 July 2008 17:07:10 UTC