[Scl] Re: Report on Common Logic

[pat hayes]

>pat hayes wrote:
>[...]
>>John, we still await a CG concrete syntax.
>>
>>Everyone else: we also still need an XML concrete syntax.
>
>Pat,
>
>Are things actually stable enough for that yet? Don't questions
>about seqvars have to be answered definitively first? Are there
>any other outstanding issues that you guys need to agree upon?

Yes, but not which affect the design of the syntax - except those I 
mentioned in my recent message. I hope we can come o a fairly rapid 
decision on these. In any case they would all be extra options in a 
basically fixed syntactic framework.

>
>After that's done, an XML syntax still isn't completely
>straightforward.

If it were we would already have done it :-)

>Like any language, you need to decide exactly
>what you're trying to do with it. Just *one* of the questions
>I brought up early on was "web-enabled" or not? Use of URIs or
>not? Any extensibility, so it can be the basis of other languages?
>Does it have to be RDF-based, or can it be a new language? Etc.

Right now I would like to keep it as simple and minimal as possible: 
just a vanilla rendering of the syntax as specified by the group into 
XML, preserving as much generality as possible. We can propose more 
exotic XML syntaxes for particular purposes later: part of the whole 
SCL ethos is to allow many concrete syntactic forms.

>
>If there's to be an XML version of CL, a list of requirements
>should be the first thing created, which, if you remember, was
>the first part of the XCL proposal I created way back when, in
>the section on "Design Goals":
>
>    XML Common Logic (XCL) 1.0, 8 May 2003.
>    http://purl.org/xcl/1.0/
>
>Then, when the requirements have been written and the requirements
>have been agreed upon, then somebody can close their mind and just
>write grammar rules. Until then, there could be three or four or
>more XML grammars that would "do" CL. First question is, what do you
>really want from an XML version? Hopefully not just to be able to
>say "there is an XML version." What are the goals?

Ideally, it should be an XML  syntax which allows any other SCL 
syntax to be mapped into it and thus conveyed as legal XML. That is 
probably impossible taken with full generality, so the goal should be 
to achieve this with minimal restrictions or changes to the other SCL 
syntaxes. For example, obviously it wouldn't be possible to encode an 
XML language which used "<" as a relation name without some 
protective XML embedding probably using character escape codes (?).

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
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