[SCL] Issues and proposals (details)

[Jim Hendler]

John - I concur with all you say below, note that I don't even bridle 
at the reference to RDF users as  idiots,  since it is not me, but my 
agent-based programs, that want to read that version and they are as 
idiotic as they can be.  (Of course, if we are even remotely 
successful, they'll be a lot more of them than us reading this stuff)
  -JH

At 8:27 -0500 1/15/03, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Jim,
>
>I completely agree with the following point:
>
>>  One thing we've been learning in the RDFS/OWL world is that just
>>  putting things into XML doesn't help much - the key is identifying
>>  some real world "use cases," focusing on their needs, and being
>>  compatible with the languages and tools they use.
>
>That has always been true, and it always will be true.  I spent
>30 years working at IBM, and I've had those lessons drummed into
>my head many times, painfully and often.
>
>But your response to my point missed the point:
>
>JS> However, I don't believe that we should sacrifice a good
>>  solid design for CL/SCL in order to perpetuate poor design
>>  decisions by people who didn't understand the issues.
>
>JH> which may be why none of the proposed web logics has found much
>>  traction on the web yet -- it's worth noting that purity of heart
>>  by us AI folks is fine and good, but there's a lot more of "them"
>>  out there than us, and we need to make things inoperate.
>
>Everbody appreciates good design decisions -- "them" and "us".
>They aren't stupid -- they're just ignorant.  Ignorance is
>curable by education -- but stupidity is forever.  There were
>a lot of ignorant people at IBM, and they made many ignorant
>decisions, such as the adoption of EBCDIC instead of ASCII
>because EBCDIC required less circuitry in the card reader.
>They are the same kind of people who designed RDF.
>
>And what I was recommending maintains all the compatability and
>interoperability, and it supports every "use case" that can be
>dreamed up for RDF.  It simply avoids perpetuating a dead-end
>syntax.  Following is my recommendation:
>
>  1. SCL has a notation-independent semantics, which can be
>     expressed in many different concrete syntaxes.
>
>  2. Among the concrete syntaxes are KIF, CGIF, and many
>     different versions of XML-based notations.
>
>  3. So we can support several different XML-based notations.
>
>     (a) A truly ugly one that is based on the current RDF.
>
>     (b) A clean, but verbose version that follows the lines
>         that Chris M. suggested.
>
>     (c) More compact versions, which allow KIF, CGIF, and any
>         other SCL-compatible language to be supported with tags
>         such as <logic language="KIF">...</logic>.
>
>  4. All of these notations are compatible, interoperable, and
>     intertranslatable.  They support exactly the same use cases.
>     Idiots can use (a), ande cognoscenti can use (c).  End users
>     won't be able to tell the difference, except in performance
>     and reliability.
>
>John
>
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-- 
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