Re: [namespaceDocument-8] 14 Theses, take 2

/ "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org> was heard to say:
| Most folks who use DAML+OIL, soon to be WebOnt, to define
| an ontology I th9ink feel they are done without any other material,

I think they're mistaken.

| as the best practice is to put the descriptions into the ontology docuement
| where they are explicitly associated with the properties being defined.
| http://www.daml.org/ontologies/uri.html  lists a whole bunch of ontologies
| defined in DAML.

As an example, I was interested in an ontology for genealogy and I
went looking at the examples on the DAML site. There are clearly some
genealogy ontologies there, but a little human readable documentation
for them would go a long way towards making them useful. (Apologies,
in advance, if the documentation is there and I missed it; it's quite
possible as I had only a brief moment between other tasks to
investigate.)

| [...]
| DanC:
|> >I'm not interested in debating
|> >
|> >  12. Namespace documents should be human-readable.
|> >
|> >independent of a principle that
|> >
|> >  Documents should be human-readable.
| TBray:
|> Well, I am.  It's hard to see how SVG and MathML and RDF and
|> X3D can be made usefully human-readable.  We're not allowed
|> to talk about whether namespace docs should be human-readable
|> until we have solutions in place for the whole spectrum of
|> languages?  I am arguing precisely that namespace documents
|> have an unusually strong requirement for human readability. -Tim
|
| Hang on - SVG is human-readable, as is MathML and X3D -- all are langauges
| for material to be presentedto a human.  We are not talking about making the
| source human-readble I hope.

Yet another gray area. If your only criteria for human readability is
that it be possible to display a rendering, then RTF (T not D) and PDF
and a whole host of formats that most of us think of as opaque are
"human readable".

So there's some sense in which, yes, we're talking about making the
source human-readable or perhaps more accurately human accessible.

| RDF is an interesting case but making it human-readable is doable in orll
| sorts of ways.  You can use a style sheet (@@ example on line?) and you can

The same is true of SVG and MathML and all of the other examples. For any given
example, I could construct a human-readable representation. Perhaps you think
that a single transformation can do this for the universe of RDF documents.
You might be right, but my intuition doesn't suggest that that's possible.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM   | It is seldom that any liberty is lost all at
XML Standards Engineer | once.--David Hume
XML Technology Center  | 
Sun Microsystems, Inc. |

Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 10:06:03 UTC