[SCL] Re: telecon May 13 2003

[Murray Altheim]

pat hayes wrote:
 > Telecon tomorrow (tuesday) at 0900 CDT/1500 BST/1600 CEST. Call (US-)413
 > 351 4140, please say your name when you enter, thanks.

Egad. The time is unclear since I can't remember how to calculate US
daylight time from GMT, and "BST/CEST" are unknown to me. I'm on London
(UK) time, 1 hour later than GMT. Is that the same as CEST? (sorry, just
never had to deal with this before, having lived here only about a year)
It's about 2:15am here right now (yes, I'm usually up late).

 > Murray, if you could join us that would be great. Thre are lots of
 > things that would be more usefully handled with the higher bandwidth of
 > a phone conversation.

Thanks very much for the invitation. If I can figure out the time I'd
be happy to contribute, even if I have to pay for the call myself. (I'm
not sure if KMi would be willing to let me under the OU's current budget
crisis, but I'll check).

 > Agenda (provisional)
 >
 > 0.  Roll call, AOB
 >
 > 1. Timetable
 >
 > 2. SCL core abstract syntax & model theory
 >
 > 3. XML syntax: discussion of
 >
 > 3a   goals   (particularly with reference to section 1 of Murrays's
 > document http://www.altheim.com/specs/xcl/1.0/ )

Perhaps consider a formal "Requirements" section in the spec?

 > 3b  verbosity and useability
 >
 > 3c  relations to RDF
 >
 > 4.  Other syntaxes: CGs? More than one XML syntax?

The idea of a simple syntax without links and one designed for
the web were my two "takes" on this. I wonder what other approaches
might make sense.  And I'd love to see this expanded to support
CGs in some future extension.

Also, the possibility of adding various features to the spec so
that it'd be easier to discuss, as mentioned in

   http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/scl/2003-May/000146.html

I suggested to Chris in private email the idea of using a revision
control system like CVS to manage the documents. He has plenty of
experience with CVS (as do I) and I think this would be an extremely
good idea, especially on a relatively fast-moving document. It goes
along with your ideas, Pat, on having available multiple versions
of the document and keeping track of which is which.

And honestly, you'd only have to learn about four commands if you
didn't already know CVS (add, checkout, update, and commit). It
works on all platforms, works over the net (server-based, or local
to your own machine). Most developers and some poets (!) use it.

Murray

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

   [...T]here will be a simulated biological attack on Chicago, with
   thousands of patients showing symptoms of serious illnesses
   beginning to appear in the city's hospitals on Tuesday. [...] The
   exercise is planned to end on a positive note, with suspects being
   arrested at the end of the week.
             -- "US drills for terror attacks", BBC News, 12 May 2003

   The terrorist attack is taken for granted, but endlessly postponed.
   The true catastrophe is that we are living under a permenent threat
   of catastrophe. -- Slavoj Zizek, The New Yorker, 5 May 2003 [38-47]