- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 03:20:10 -0400
- To: "Lynn Andrea Stein" <lynn.stein@olin.edu>
- Cc: www-webont-wg@w3.org
>Several questions/clarifications: > > >In http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Mar/0173.html, "Peter >F. Patel-Schneider" wrote: > >> Potential Desiderata for the Web Ontology Language > >I (LAS) include only those potential desiderata on which I have something to >say/ask. > >> Syntax: >> >> 1/ Syntax is (equivalent to) n-triples (i.e., RDF syntax). >> All syntax (except, maybe, datatypes) is carried in triples. > >Pretty clearly we will need *some* sort of (unordered) listing/grouping >construct that is bounded, i.e., defines a list/group containing *exactly* the >listed/grouped elements. daml:collection was one attempt to provide such a >thing. I don't believe we can avoid having such a thing. (BTW, I also >believe that adding such a thing to RDF's semantics may cause problems as it >essentially introduces negation. Pat?) I have already replied to this with a suggestion about how to do it, but I have a more radical suggestion. We *don't need* such a construction. All we need is the ability to use some RDF triples to encode OWL syntax without those triples being asserted in the RDF graph. Then, how we make use of them to do the encoding is entirely up to us, and it can be quite arbitrary: it doesn't have to be something like an RDF description of a data structure that encodes the OWL syntax, it can just be a direct rendering of the syntax into triples according to some convention of our choosing, perhaps involving 'dereferencing' some urirefs of other RDF-triple sets to encode syntactic substructure (as Jos does in Euler) or inventing a triples encoding of an N3-style context mechanism. We aren't obliged to have a rational RDF description of OWL syntactic datatstructures. In fact, I think it would be better not to, since this way of doing things tend to actually encourage use/mention confusions, eg the use of daml:list makes it seem like DAML is *describing* its own syntax in RDF. Pat -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 Monday, 15 April 2002 10:57:34 UTC