Re: SWIG F2F during W3C TPAC week, Oct 20/21 (Cannes, France)

2008/9/3 Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>:

>> http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/cwm.tar.gz

> Hmm.  That appears to be the source for CWM.  Which file should I go to
> in the tarball?  Is there any formal relationship between CWM and N3?

As far as I am aware, formal no, formative yes.

>> >> Dunno, is http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/n3/ 'full' enough?

> My view is that the document is horribly inadequate as a specification
> of N3 as a representation language.

Hmm - as I understand it, the Turtle subset of N3 is intended to map
1:1 with RDF (I may be wrong on this, but I suspect it can do some of
the edge cases that RDF/XML syntax can't handle), which appears to be
rather a well-specified representation language. Does RDF + N3
extensions break its monotonicity?

>> I would imagine that depends which constructs of N3 are used. (I
>> believe in general you'd get multiple graphs + rules)
>
> Oh?  This is a bit surprising.  I had thought that an N3 document could
> be processed into a single RDF graph.  I would be interested to see
> where the multiplicity comes from.

I believe multiple graphs can be (genuinely) quoted in N3 as formulae
- IANAL, strictly speaking does that mean it's all one graph?

>> > However, I believe that there
>> > is no chance that I (or anyone else) could use solely that document to
>> > implement reliable reasoning in N3 or to develop a formal meaning for
>> > N3.

> Of course, I *could* implement something that might look a bit like N3,
> if I made a whole bunch of assumptions about the logical underpinning of
> N3.

...and why not? Could be fun.

But that is not the way things should work.  The N3 document should
> provide these underpinnings to me.

Why so? Offhand I can't think of a single spec of this nature that got
everything right first time.

I didn't start the thread, I was just responding to
> the claim by Phil Archer in
>  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Sep/0001.html
> that N3 is "fully specified and understood".

There exists at least one person for whom I suspect that is true. Ask Tim :-)

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://dannyayers.com
~
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/this_weeks_semantic_web/

Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2008 18:22:19 UTC