[SCL] Issues and proposals (details)

[Jim Hendler]

>Jim,
>
>I'm not sure who or what "them" refers to:
>
>JH> Of course, if we are even remotely successful, they'll be a lot more
>>  of them than us reading this stuff.

in the context I wrote it, them is agents -- the purpose of RDF is 
not to make it easy on the document writers, but on the things that 
process it.  Viewed as a logical langauge, RDF is of course 
insufficient to be everything - but of course it is not a logical 
language.  The key is that the triples of RDF map to links on the 
web, so if you want to embed things in the web, for real, instead of 
having a document language, then you need something like this -- 
either use RDF or invent your own competitor - you have to do it one 
way or the other...

>
>Agents?  RDF designers?  RDF (human) programmers?
>
>In any case, it doesn't matter.  A good SCL design would supported
>by the same XML parsers as the RDF design.  So those programs and
>programmers could just as easily (or even more easily) take advantage
>of a clean SCL syntax as a grungy RDF syntax.

sure, if your goal is clean documents and special purpose tools.  if 
your goal is to expose the semantics and make it linkable, which is 
what I care about, the language needs different features.  Some day 
some of the rest of you folks should learn what we really mean by the 
Semantic Web -- I think Pat gets it, and the Sem Web is profiting 
from his involvement.

Of course, I don't really care - the language I insisted we build on 
top of RDF (DAML+OIL) is now the most used AI language in history, is 
on 10s of thousands of web pages, and has gone from silly debates to 
a real language -- OWL already has a larger user base than KIF and it 
hasn't even been published yet.

>
>In fact, if I were developing commercial software, I would be delighted
>to have my competitors use RDF syntax while I took advantage of a
>cleaner, more efficient syntax.

I won't even go there John, but I will save this message so I can 
make you eat those words some day...
-- 
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