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

At 20:09 -0800 3/30/04, Uschold, Michael F wrote:
>I propose that by convention all OWL fragments are given using the 
>reader-friendly abstract syntax, rather than the parser-friendly XML 
>syntax.  Personaly, I cannot read OWL fragments well enough to be 
>motivated to ever understand the details, so I tend to skip over 
>them.  Even when I can get motivated, it takes way too much time.

I object to this strongly -- that syntax is neither reader friendly 
nor actually a part of the recommendation.  Much more importantly, we 
should be creating fragments that people can cut and paste into their 
documents (and edit) -- forcing them to figure out the mapping from 
the so-called human readable syntax into actually RDF or OWL (XML or 
N3) makes no sense.

>
>I would argue very strongly that any public documents published by 
>this WG  do use the more readable syntax. Why not get used to it 
>when we communicate with each other? It will also make it easier to 
>grab things from discussions in the archive and plunk them into 
>documents, instead of having to translate into the abstract syntax 
>suitable for the public.

I advocate use of "turtle" - which should be the first document this 
WG approves as a working note (if Dave is willing)

>
>Of course, if the discussion is about parsing, or about the syntax 
>of the language, then it is better to use the parser-friendly 
>syntax, both for internal discussions and for publised documents.
>

what is parser friendly?

>What do people think about this suggestion?
>
>If the overwhelming majority of this WG actually PREFER to read the 
>parser-friendly syntax, then perhaps I'd best get used to it, but it 
>there are many like me, it makes sense to use a more reader-friendly 
>syntax.
>

well, we could get into whether this is a voting issue for a WG (be 
careful when you use words like "majority" in a W3C group) but my 
vote is for N3 (Turtle) which is a nice compromise - or else to stick 
w/the RDF/XML for cut and paste reasons
  -JH
p.s. Mike - have you noticed our world view doesn't always seem to align :->
-- 
Professor James Hendler			  http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-277-3388 (Cell)

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2004 23:22:29 UTC