[SCL] Issues

[Jim Hendler]

Pat etal-
  Being new to the CL/SCL world, I'm not sure the scope of your 
activity (and look forward to seeing your statement of interests). 
On the issues front, I could raise several, but don't want to go too 
far out of scope:
  "Logic" has lots of things included:  What the base logic is (FOL, 
HOL, etc) and "how it works";  How one expresses things in that logic 
- how to write axioms and facts so a prover can work on them; How the 
logic "returns" answers - that is, does it solely prove things true 
or false, or will it provide bindings for variables; does it only 
provide the bindings or can it show the proof tree in some form; etc.
  I'm sure you all have argued about much of this in the past. and the 
last thing I want is a dump of all that - but from an issues 
perspective it would help to know how things scope.  In particular, I 
am very interested both in the expression of rules on the web 
(connected to the sorts of ontologies provided by OWL) and even more 
so in the exchange of proofs on the web - which, if done right, could 
really prove an amazingly strong case for the deployment of logics on 
web resources.  (For example, my favorite is an e-business contract 
in which your system could send to my bank a proof that I had made a 
purchase at an agreed upon price, and my bank would transfer the 
money assuming all was appropriately signed and assured.  Tim BL's 
favorite is web site access - his example is that you can access the 
W3C member site if you can prove you work for one of the members - 
and that proof probably includes some sort of signed statement from 
some database that you work for X, coupled with the W3C's assertion 
that X is a member).
  If that sort of proof exchange would be in scope, a number of issues arise.
  If not, let me know and I can think of lots of other issues beyond 
the "what logic is used" that make your work more relevant to the 
deployment of machine-readable, logically-grounded statements on the 
Web (i.e. what some of us call the "Semantic Web")
   -JH
p.s. Given you got to play "formalist gadfly" on my working group, 
it's only far I get to play scruffy gadfly on yours...

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler at cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler