- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 11:06:20 -0500
- To: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com>
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
>At 07:04 PM 6/26/01 +0100, Brian McBride wrote: >>Graham, you have made a proposal for an absract syntax and semantics. I am >>assuming that you feel pretty neutral about the actual concrete form of >>the syntax and that n-triple can represent everything you need at the >>syntactic level. If that is so, then we can focus on the question of >>reification on the semantics rather than the syntax. > >Yes, with one proviso: > >Some semantics depend on an interpretation of more than one triple >used in concert. Following the style of attaching interpretations >to syntax productions, it may be necessary use a "model syntax" that >is more complex than the minimal syntax needed to describe N-triple. Graham, I have a strong worry about doing this in the revised standard. "used in concert" is just a way to say that there is a syntactic construction which is not in fact explicitly encoded in RDF content. It would mean that the criteria for wellformedness were not explicitly represented in the syntax, unless we introduced some new syntax (not just some new syntactic classes) to actually encode the ranges of these 'larger' structures. In effect, it allows for arbitrarily complex syntactic specifications to be smuggled into the RDF model invisibly. To call the n-triple encoding 'parsable' is misleading, if some of those 'parsings' are not in fact in conformity to the syntactic classes to which the semantics is attached. Look, here is a universal parsable syntax for all of the world's languages: <expression> ::= <unicode-char>* but we wouldnt normally say that this is parsable in any useful sense. Pat >Otherwise, I fully agree that everything can be based on a concrete, >parseable representation that we call N-triple (an important >property of which is that, modulo trivial matters like statement >ordering, there is only one way to represent any given RDF graph). > >#g > > >------------------------------------------------------------ >Graham Klyne Baltimore Technologies >Strategic Research Content Security Group ><Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com> <http://www.mimesweeper.com> > <http://www.baltimore.com> >------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Thursday, 28 June 2001 12:06:31 UTC