RE: [ALL] Human-friendly syntax for communicating OWL fragments

Jim Hendler wrote:

> however, I do agree with your conclusion:
>
> At 23:39 +0200 4/5/04, Frank van Harmelen wrote:
> > I find it very surprising that anybody believes that any single
> > syntax will do for all purposes, and all audiences. So at least, in
> > the WG documents, you should think who the intended audience of the
> > document is, and what is most suited for them. Sure, RDF/XML is
> > appropriate for some (e.g. a document for engineers about parsing
> > OWL), but not for all
>
> However, I personally have always had far more difficulty reading the AS
> than the N3 or RDF/XML -- I also notice that my favorite SW text to date
> [1] uses the RDF/XML syntax as the common denominator language - so I
> suspect this, like lots of other things, is not something where there are
> hard and fast rules as to which is better for what...
>
> [1] A Semantic Web Primer, Antoniou and van Harmelen, MIT Press,
> forthcoming.

Touche...:-)
Actually, just before it was shipped to the press, we rushed in an appendix 
with all OWL examples listed in AS. (I attach them to this msg).

In fact, the appendix was done under serious pressure from members of our 
preprint reading group that weren't SemWeb insiders. But we might take up 
your suggestion for the next edition, and relegate the RDF/XML to the 
appendix instead:-)

We will make the OWL code (in both AS and RDF/XML) available at 
http://www.semanticwebprimer.org

Main thing is: it's good to hear the WG will consider which syntax to use in 
which documents!

Frank.
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