Re: Patel-Schneider Paradox ...

Peter,

>  > >3/ properties with no formal meaning
>>
>>  OK, so what? They have no meaning, you can do what you like. That's
>>  not a problem.
>
>On the contrary, such constructs are endless sources of problems when they
>occur in a specification.   Sure they cause no formal problems, but they do
>cause the generation of considerable amounts of non-luminous warmth.

Unfortunately, these properties with no formal meaning have a great 
*practical* value to implemetors of real-world systems. Maybe that is 
not of interest to you ;-)

>  > >4/ the extensibility mechanism
>>
>>  What extensibility mechanism?
>
>RDFS Specification, Section 4. Extensibility Mechanisms, particularly
>4.2. Evolvability of the RDF Schema Constraint Mechanism.

We got rid of that (RDF Core WG, that is).

>  > >Now the RDF Core WG is trying very hard to address some of these 
>sources of
>>  >complexity, but the end result, as far as I can see, is *not* going to be a
>>  >simple formalism.
>>
>>  Well, like I say, a formal spec for RDF itself fits on a small 3x5
>>  card, and Ora has implemented an RDFS closure checker that runs on a
>>  cell phone. None of this seems very complex to me.
>
>Does this include the syntax for RDF?

I would not be too worried about the concrete serialization syntax of 
RDF. Given an "event stream" from an XML parser, a complete RDF 
parser (including such "fancy" stuff such as parsetype="Literal") can 
be expressed as a simple state-machine with 4 states (if interested, 
see slide #4 of my presentation at SWWS'01, linked off 
http://www.lassila.org/publications/2001/swws-01-abstract.shtml). I 
am much more worried about XML which I consider to be awkward and 
frustrating. Could we have s-expressions instead? Pleeease :-)

Regards,

	- Ora

-- 
Ora Lassila  mailto:daml@lassila.org  http://www.lassila.org/
Research Fellow, Nokia Research Center

Received on Monday, 18 February 2002 11:03:47 UTC