[SCL] Re: XML syntax for CL

[Tanel Tammet]

Hi,

A few words about the SCL-in-XML subproject.

I'll give a bit of history to help sorting up possible confusion first.

- A few weeks ago I sent an early draft of SCL-in-XML proposal
   to the SCL list, as I had promised to do. Discussed it later with some
   theorem proving people, got some ideas for improvements. Waited fo
   SCL list comments.
- SCL list was quiet, no comments, no traffic.
- Yesterday I asked Pat to look into the proposal and comment.
   Pat promised to do so.
- Now it appears Murray has taken up the draft proposal, worked on
   it and directly published the new proposal at
   http://purl.org/xcl/1.0/  and
   http://www.altheim.com/specs/xcl/1.0/
   claiming the author to be Murray Altheim.
- Pat noticed and commented on the proposal, being basically
   unhappy with the XML itself.
- Murray sent a long letter explaining his background, motivation,
   OK-ness of XML etc.


First, many thanks to Murray for taking up the draft and improving
on it!

Considering the contents of Murrays and Pat's suggestions and ideas,
I have to think a bit before coming up with a new revision of
my draft. I'll probably do it in a day and send comments/answers
along with a slightly modified draft.

Second, in order to avoid further confusion I'd propose that we
proceed as follows (cannot force anyone to do so, but it just
seems reasonable):


- Murray, would you please edit your current document on the web,
   saying directly at the title / authorship header part that:

   - it is an early draft
   - it is a part of (or based on) the SCL project
   - editors are Murray Altheim and Tanel Tammet
   - no authors should be mentioned (or the whole collective authorship
     of SCL people plus Muray should be given)

   otherwise it looks like you hijacked the SCL work (inc mine) without
   giving any credit.

- Murray, I'd be most happy if you (at least initially) join the
   SCL-in-XML  draft work in the SCL context: help improving the
   SCL-in-XML draft, for the SCL report.

   Once we get somewhere there it would be OK to make a branch
   if you so wish, call it XCL etc. But not right now. Hopefully
   we get somewhere with the draft very soon (after all, the
   minimalist common logic is a very simple matter. The nontrivial
   things are extensions, which we should IMHO put to a separate
   layer.)

- Regardless of the verbosity of XML we need to have SCL-XML as one
   of the concrete syntaxes. We cannot remove the inherent verbosity
   of XML there. There is no point in complaining that XML is
   verbose: it is designed to be so. Our ownly means of countering
   would be to AVOID writing SCL-in-XML concrete syntax altogether,
   which probably would not be a good idea.

- XML and RDF/OWL family are two separate families of languages.
   I am beginning to think that we might need a separate concrete
   syntax for SCL-in-RDF (different from SCL-in-XML!).

   It does not seem to be feasible to use ONE concrete XML syntax
   for SCL-in-XML and SCL-in-RDF. We should not try to treat
   the current SCL-in-XML syntax as meant for RDF. It is not.
   It should not be meant for RDF.

   We might simply need another syntax for putting SCL into RDF.

   If we do it, the result would conceptually be a direct competition to
   OWL, btw.

- The BEST WAY to improve the SCL-in-XML is to come up with an early
   draft for SCL itself. We still lack it! Who is supposed to be
   responsible for this draft? Just a brief, ca three pages draft would
   IMH be sufficient for significant progress.

   Otherwise we will unnecessarily concentrate on some concrete
   syntax issues.

- Regarding the XML verbosity argument, the best way to counter
   is to come up with another SCL concrete syntax, be it S-expression
   based or "classical"-look-like syntax.

   Again, who is supposed to be responsible for bringing up a small
   draft (again, just a few pages, mistakes all forgiven) for
   SCL-in-S-expressions and SCL-in-classical-syntax?

   Anybody feeling some courage in yourself, please just write one
   (even examples and a laundry list of main items will suffice)
   and send it to the SCL list :-)

Regards,
          Tanel Tammet


PS: please observe the name is Tanel, not Tamel :-)