[SCL] Comments on Pat's SCL document

[Murray Altheim]

John F. Sowa wrote:
> Pat,
> 
> I'm working on a CGIF definition with two parts:
> 
>   1. EBNF definition of the CGIF syntax.
> 
>   2. CGIF <-> SCL correspondences to define
>      the semantics.
> 
> A version of Part I is attached (but I plan to make
> further revisions and extensions) later this week,
> so don't consider this one definitive.  The main
> addition will be a representation of seqvars.
> I am adopting the simplest and quickest way of
> adding seqvars to CGIF:  copy the KIF syntax.

John,

Rather than explain, I thought I'd just modify the document you
sent and send it back along to you. For those interested in the
markup, all I've done is make links for each language component
that John thought proper as a definition term (<dt>, in HTML),
and done a little stylesheet cleanup, etc.

I've gone ahead and requested registration of the PURL for SCL as

     http://purl.org/scl/        (case is insignificant)

and I'd suggest that wherever the final resting place of the spec
is, it be put in a versioned directory "1.0" so that the first
version of SCL has a canonical location of:

     http://purl.org/scl/1.0/

Then, each of the components has a canonical identifier, e.g.,

     http://purl.org/scl/1.0/#cgif_arc
     http://purl.org/scl/1.0/#cgif_boundLabel
     http://purl.org/scl/1.0/#cgif_cg
     http://purl.org/scl/1.0/#cgif_concept
     etc.

This is similar to what OWL has done, though in their case they just
made up URLs. We can have resolvable ones, which point to the definition.
There's been big arguments over the past five years or so about what
a URI used as an identifier should resolve to. Some say RDF. Dumb thing
about that idea is that in a few years RDF will be obsolete (if it's
not already). Pointing to human-readable documentation is always a good
idea. We will (hopefully) still be humans in five or ten years, whereas
RDF will have gone through three or four changes by then, or have died.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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