[SCL] XML syntax for CL

[pat hayes]

Guys, we have too many cooks stirring  pots.

At a telecon a few weeks ago, Tamel agreed to make a draft XML syntax 
for CL proposal.  I thought it was understood that he would take 
Chris M's DTD as a starting point, and maybe he did, or maybe that 
idea got lost, Im not sure.

In the meantime, Tamel has produced a document

http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/scl/2003-April/000125.html

and nobody is paying it any attention. Well, someone is:

http://www.altheim.com/specs/xcl/1.0/

Many thanks, Murray.

Clearly there is more than one way to use XML to give a syntax. 
Before we get down to details of bugs and fixes, can we discuss the 
overall best way to do it? I have to say, I don't much like either of 
the ones we have at the present  but lets at least all talk to one 
another about what we are all doing. For a start, could each of you, 
Chris M . and Tamel, and Murray if you have time, look at what the 
others have done and maybe mutually critique, or at least comment? 
Bearing in mind that we have to actually get to a consensus 
eventually, of course.

Many thanks to everyone for all the work, but we need to coordinate. 
Unfortunately (?) this is one area where I do not feel competent to 
adjudicate between rival criteria for adequacy.

Like most other XML syntaxes I have been obliged to deal with, these 
proposals seem to me to be so ugly, long-winded, 
information-deficient, unreadable and virtually impossible to use 
that it is hard to believe that anyone would seriously suggest using 
them for any purpose.  Maybe I'm just missing the point of XML, but I 
wish someone would tell me what the point is supposed to be. The 
example used by Tamel uses 61 characters in a reasonable logical 
notation, which becomes approximately 400 characters in the bare XML 
rendering, and would expand to something closer to 800 characters 
when embedded in a fully decorated XML document with all its 
surrounding scaffolding, canonical identifiers and so on. The 
information density has decreased by about 1.3 orders of magnitude 
and the document has become unreadable and harder to parse. Can 
anyone tell me what has been gained by this transformation?

But no doubt I should avoid such complaining, as I have found that it 
is not productive when talking to XML enthusiasts.

Perhaps more to the point, however, is the need for us to take 
seriously the potential need to interact with the RDF style of using 
XML. Consider an OWL ontology encoded as an OWL-RDF graph written in 
RDF/XML.
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/ , see particularly 
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-semantics/
The ontology itself has a natural translation into CL (similar to the 
one in http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes/OWL2LBASE.html , though it 
could be done slightly differently). If we were to do that 
translation, then write the CL in XML, what, if any, relationship 
might there be between that piece of XML and the OWL/RDF/XML (see 
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/) ?

Can anyone make a telecon next Tuesday?

Pat

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