Re: pruning the semantics document (and "meaningless terms")

Brian McBride wrote:

> At 09:21 12/12/2002 -0500, Frank Manola wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> 
>> Patrick--
>>
>> No apology necessary, and I didn't take what you said as a criticism 
>> of the Primer itself.  I was just commenting on the fact that the 
>> terms were being described as "meaningless", and that hence all the 
>> discussion should be removed from the Primer, when much of that same 
>> discussion (or descriptions on which such discussion might reasonably 
>> be based) appears in normative documents.  I'm not commenting on 
>> whether that discussion (or other statements of "intent") appear in 
>> normative or non-normative sections of those documents.  We might 
>> reasonably have further discussion about those distinctions, and/or 
>> about what normative things we intend to say about the vocabulary 
>> items in question.
>>
>> My basic comment, though, is that the Primer has in good faith tried 
>> to convey my understanding of what the WG intends those items to 
>> mean.  It necessarily elaborates on those things more than some of the 
>> other documents partly in order to do its job, and partly due to the 
>> deliberate sparseness of description in other documents.  I've 
>> commented on that sparseness in the past, and the consensus seemed to 
>> have been that that's OK, because the elaboration will go in the 
>> Primer.  However if, due to that sparseness in other documents, we're 
>> then going to argue that more complete discussion in the Primer should 
>> be eliminated, this seems to me to be an unfortunate piece of circular 
>> argument, and I'm going to have to insist that more complete 
>> discussion get included (or remain) in the other documents.
> 
> 
> I think one of the issues we have here is that we are bit behind with 
> the vocabulary document and that is leaving a bit of a hole.  In this 
> regard I think I am agreeing with some comments Graham made earlier.
> 
> I suggest that any normative statements that must be made about 
> vocabulary terms, but that are not model theoretic in nature, are made 
> in the vocabulary document.
> 
> That way, Pat is free to slim down the semantics document.
> 
> Please can we just get on and write up the decisions that we have 
> already made.
> 


Fine with me.

--Frank

 


-- 
Frank Manola                   The MITRE Corporation
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Received on Thursday, 12 December 2002 12:32:09 UTC