Re: The author of a query is most likely the user

Hi Bijan --

Now that the long weekend is upon us (in the US of A), there's finally time 
to study the online post-rules-workshop  discussion. ( 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rule-workshop-discuss/2005Jun/ )

I'd like please to take you up on what may seem like a small point, that 
you made a while ago, and argue that it is very important.

At 02:03 PM 6/22/2005 -0400, you wrote:
...the author of the query is most likely the person evaluating the query

Depends, I suppose, by what you mean by "evaluating".  Yes, a programmer 
will test the query after writing it.  But of course, in the real world, 
almost all the people -- or machines -- that run the query will _not_ be 
the programmer who wrote it.

So, there is scope the size of the Grand Canyon for a user to misunderstand 
what the programmer had in mind.  And the data underneath the query may 
have changed since the query was written, so the programmer's testing may 
anyway have been incomplete.

On the plus side, we can write rules in lightweight, executable English, eg 
as in [1], so that English explanations can give each user a pretty good 
idea of what is going on, right down to the data.

Reasoning chains over a static database quickly get too complex for a 
programmer to manually check the relation to a business or scientific 
requirement [2,3], so I'd argue that it is even more important for a rules 
language to document real world concepts -- and to do so executably rather 
than in comments -- when we move to reasoning over the Semantic Web.

Makes the Semantic Web more Semantic (:-).   What do you think?

                         Cheers,   -- Adrian

[1]  Internet Business Logic, online at the site below

[2]  http://www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/RDFQueryLangComparison1.agent

[3] 
http://www.reengineeringllc.com/Oil_Industry_Supply_Chain_by_Kowalski_and_Walker.pdf




INTERNET BUSINESS LOGIC (R)
www.reengineeringllc.com

Adrian Walker
Reengineering LLC
PO Box 1412
Bristol
CT 06011-1412 USA

Phone: USA 860 583 9677
Cell:    USA  860 830 2085
Fax:    USA  860 314 1029

Received on Sunday, 3 July 2005 19:21:15 UTC