- From: Danny Ayers <danny666@virgilio.it>
- Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 18:02:21 +0200
- To: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Cc: public-sws-ig <public-sws-ig@w3.org>, David Martin <martin@AI.SRI.COM>
Bijan Parsia wrote: > > [snip] > > Danny, our current solution for this problem is to provide a > completely distinct surface syntax that is more concise and more > readable and encodes into the syntactic structure much of the stuff we > must make explicit in OWL. > > A current version of the proposal (which is a bit Lispy at the moment): > http://www.daml.org/services/owl-s/1.0/surface.pdf Ah right, thanks, I seem to have missed this. > > I'm interesting to know if you think mixing RDF and some other syntax > a la your proposal is better than having a complete drop in > replacement. I'm inclined to the latter, myself. Hmm, must confess I'm in two minds. For true human-legibility a total replacement certainly is better, but something along the lines of my suggestion would keep most of the key parts of the RDF machine-readable in the interchange syntax, while the tasty part (the interface definition itself) is human readable directly, machine readable given a little translation. Of course pretty much any syntax can be used locally, and translated at the end points, so it's not a big deal in any case... The choice of a Lisp-like syntax is interesting. Who the target audience for this? If it's 'old school' krep folks, then it's bound to do well. However if the aim is to get web developers to use it, then I'd anticipate resistance, and would have thought swapping the braces for angle brackets (a la OWL Presentation Syntax) would be good politics ;-) But on both points, given that work that has already been done on the surface syntax I'd lean towards the current approach. Cheers, Danny. -- ---- Raw http://dannyayers.com
Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 11:02:34 UTC