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

Mike,

I strongly support your suggestion about this.
I recently sent an email to the protege discussion list about this
(see [1]).

- Protege's OWL pluging is already able to export the Abstract Syntax,
- they are about to make a new tab for it which allows you to copy/paste
  the abstract syntax from the screen
- there is an on-line service in Manchester which translates the XML/RDF
  syntax to Abstract Syntax (see [2])
  (all we need is a convertor in the other direction (should be easy)
- all examples in our new textbook (<http://www.semanticwebprimer.org>)
  are also given in abstract syntax,
- see [3] and [4] for a long example (the infamous wildlife example)
  in both raw RDF/XML and Abstract Syntax, and see the difference

Frank.
   ---

[1] <http://protege.stanford.edu/mail_archive/msg08462.html>
[2] <http://phoebus.cs.man.ac.uk:9999/OWL/Validator>
[3] <http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/spool/wildlife.owl>
[4] <http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/spool/wildlife.abs>


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 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.
>
> 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 do people think about this suggestion?

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 01:44:20 UTC