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

As always I share both Jim's and Mike's concerns - despite them disagreeing.

It really doesn't help that the abstract syntax to triples mapping is 
many-to-many ...

Jeremy



Jim Hendler wrote:

> 
> 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 
> :->

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 02:07:44 UTC