[SCL] Fwd: Common Logic status with respect to standards

[pat hayes]

>pat hayes wrote:
>[...]
>>Murray, can you suggest how best to render SCL into XML? I think 
>>what we should aim at here is not so much a fully-fledged XML user 
>>syntax, so much as a way to take (almost) any SCL concrete language 
>>and convey it down an XML pipe, so that the original form can be 
>>extracted at the other end with minimal work using XML tools as far 
>>as possible to 'parse' the XML. This thinks of XML as a way to 
>>convey other syntactic forms between computers, rather than as a 
>>markup language; but still it seems to me to be a reasonable goal.
>
>Any codified XML syntax is by definition a markup language, and from
>your request I can't see exactly what you'd want that would be different
>from what I think of as a markup language.

I may have mis-spoke: forgive me. What I meant to say was that it 
would not itself be a language in its own right, in the sense that, 
say, RDF/XML is a language, but rather that it would be a system of 
markup which would facilitate the exchange of other languages (the 
SCL concrete syntaxes). Perhaps this is trivial (?), although the 
issues you raised about for example connecting content from several 
documents still seem to be relevant. Also, do you have any thoughts 
on how to include SCL (or indeed anything else) inside XHTML without 
causing browsers to display the SCL? (If that last question is 
completely off the wall, ignore it.)

>If the document at
>
>      http://cl.tamu.edu/docs/scl/scl-latest.html
>
>is the latest, if all you want is (from what I can tell) what you say,
>they the section "A XML DTD for SCL" already has what you want. As to
>how that matches up with the abstract syntax, I have no idea. Nor
>could I unless I understood SCL better, which is one of the reasons
>why you can't act in some mechanized way in designing markup languages.
>If you want something as simplistic as what's in the SCL document, you've
>already got it.

Well, maybe that is all we need for the present, then.

>  It's not the language I'd design, but it's your project.
>
>>I have in mind something like every syntactic 'piece' being the 
>>string(s) that it is in the other concrete syntax but with XML 
>>markup enclosing it and indicating its SCL abstract-syntactic role, 
>>rather like English marked up with XML for a linguistics-101 
>>parser. If there was a way to use the XML headers to encode things 
>>like the name of the dialect and the particular SCL subset it was 
>>using (and any other information that might be handy) that would be 
>>great, but that is icing at the present time and with our Dec 17 
>>deadline.
>
>Adding a couple of attributes on the document element for such
>metadata, or creating a metadata element is simple stuff. I'm
>much more concerned about whether or not the syntax makes any
>sense, and speaking with my engineering hat on (toot!toot!)

:-)

>, I'd
>have to say I don't have enough information or knowledge to be
>able to provide any assessment of that. I'm not in a position to
>solely remedy that either.

Let me try to put the point in the form of a question. The SCL 
abstract syntax allows many different concrete syntaxes to exist with 
the same abstract form. So for example we might have a piece of 
textbook-logic with infix connectives and relational atoms indicated 
like R(a,b) and R(b,c), and names being character strings without 
whitespace. Or, we might have a postfix Post-style notation in which 
this would be written as abRbcR&; or a graphical CG-style notation, 
or whatever. Think of all of these encoded as text in various 
documents: could there be a single way to mark these all up in XML so 
that they all exhibit the same abstract SCL structure on their 
sleeve, as it were?

Pat

>Murray
>
>......................................................................
>Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
>Knowledge Media Institute
>The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .
>
>   Monkeys use thoughts to control robotic arm
>     http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/13/MN2018.DTL
>   Bush uses media expertly to push apocalyptic view
>     http://truthout.org/docs_03/091403J.shtml


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