[SCL] Second version of the SCL draft spec here

Mon Nov 3 19:37:37 CST 2003

pat hayes wrote:
> Murray Altheim wrote to Chris Menzel:
>
>> Chris,
>>
>> Not wanting to add too much to your workload, but one of the things
>> I'd really appreciate would be that all "major" components of the
>> SCL spec have HTML link anchors on them, so that they establish URLs
>> which can be used to identify them when people build from the SCL
>> spec.
> 
> Good idea if those are just XHTML anchors, but...

That's all they are. The semantics are defined at specific locations
in the document, I'm just wanting a way to point to them.

>> This is what I've described before as "published subject
>> identifiers" (PSIs), and is what essentially is used in OWL, Dublin
>> Core, etc. By "major" components, I would include anything that a
>> derived concrete syntax might need to connect it up with the SCL
>> abstract syntax, either in prose or in machine code/markup.
>>
>> For example, owl:Thing is defined in XML by "Thing" in the "owl"
>> namespace. There's also the URL
>>
>>    http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#Thing
> 
> BUt the *denotative* status of such URIrefs is highly controversial; the 
> W3C TAG group is in turmoil about this very issue even as we speak.

I realize you want this all to sync up with what they're doing, but
I'd suggest just ignoring them. They'll be arguing about this two
years from now too. You only pay attention to those you consider an
authority. I guess I don't consider the W3C to have any authority;
they're just one of a number of industry consortia. I think they
burned up that status on this question several years ago, and they've
been wasting precious human resources on it ever since. If the people
contributing to that discussion would have spent that energy digging
wells, the people of Africa would have a clean water supply by now.
What's more important are the communities of people doing real work.
Much of what the W3C has done in the past few years has been counter-
productive to real work. You want real work done here, right?

> I agree that this would be worth doing, but we need to be extremely 
> clear what exactly it is that we take these names to be denoting, 
> particularly in the abstract-syntax framework.

Those anchors are just pointing to the definition of the SCL language
components. If you declare that in the SCL document that the use of a
specific URI is meant to mean X, it means X. It doesn't mean Y. You
are the author of the document, you declare your own meaning. What
the W3C TAG says is relevant only to those that pay attention to what
they say. I demand the right to author my owned damned documents and
declare their meaning, absent anything they say.

Now, from your most recent message, you've stated that you put a very
high concern in contributing to the W3C "Semantic Web" effort. If we
are to all come clean, I suppose by now that it might go without saying
that it would be difficult for me to care less about what goes on in
the W3C. I consider the KR/Ontological Engineering community to be
functioning just fine without the W3C. So I personally am not centrally
concerned with the W3C and have no particular desire to please their
set of requirements.

If that puts us at odds in my designing the XCL syntax, I can only
provide you that fair warning. My work conforms to XML 1.0 2nd Edition,
plus (begrudgingly) the XML Namespaces Recommendation, but I'm not going
to begin to try to follow the myriad of conformance spaghetti on
everything else. I'm sure there are other XML experts who can design a
syntax, if this doesn't work out, or if having my name on the XCL spec
is politically damaging [and while it may sound like it, I'm not
blustering -- I really just don't care one way or another about what
the W3C says about URIs -- I'd like to help if time permits and we can
come to a good working agreement on what needs to be done].

> This would be well worth discussing, in fact. What does the name of an 
> abstract syntactic category denote, exactly? This is relevant to any 
> attempt to include a quotation mechanism into the SCL core.
 >
>> So essentially, I'd like to see something akin to
[...]
>>    http://cl.tamu.edu/docs/scl/1.0/#forall

E.g., if that URI points to the definition of 'forall' in SCL, then
any use of that URI has identity with that definition. If we declare
that to be the case, it's the case. For purposes of illustration,
these two would be equivalent/interchangeable:

  <forall variable="x">
    <type>TrailerTruck</type>
  </forall>

  <quantifier name="http://cl.tamu.edu/docs/scl/1.0/#forall" variable="x">
    <type>TrailerTruck</type>
  </quantifier>

...if we declare them to be. And we can do that. We just do. No
clicking of our shiny red heels is necessary, no asking the man
behind the curtain for permission.

Murray

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

  White House defiant despite deadliest strike on forces since end of war
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1076578,00.html
  US defiant after Baghdad attack
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3186074.stm
  US defiant on X-Ray prisoners
    http://old.smh.com.au/news/0202/10/world/world7.html
  US defiant on war crimes court
    http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/07/01/bosnia.peacekeeping/?related
  US stands defiant despite isolation in climate debate
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,526607,00.html
  US defiant and unrepentant over largest chemical warfare campaign in history
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,923715,00.html
  Americans defiant over growing divisions with Europe
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/02/06/wter106.xml
  US defiant over missile defense
    http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/library/news/2001/space-010717-wwwh1j17.htm
  Bush defiant over 'Bin Laden tape'
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3204612.stm
  Bush defiant ahead of visit to Britain
    http://fpeng.peopledaily.com.cn/200107/18/eng20010718_75285.html
  'Bring them on,' defiant Bush warns Iraqi militants
    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/135155984_iraq03.html
  Greenhouse gas emissions soar in defiant US
    http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,515198,00.html
  Europe seethes as defiant US goes its own way
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,747743,00.html
  Defiant US threatens UNs peacekeeping role
    http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/s596992.htm
  US isolated but defiant on Cuba sanctions
    http://www.sunsonline.org/trade/process/followup/1996/04160196.htm