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

[pat hayes]

>pat hayes wrote:
>
>>>This will be a chance for the US part of the international group
>>
>>
>>What international group? Right now, SCL is being composed by a 
>>group which I convened a little less than a year ago and which 
>>consists of a small group of people all known to me. The Common 
>>Logic group is chaired by Michael Uschold and I believe have not 
>>met or had any correspondence for a year now.
>
>Ouch! That hurts, Pat; it seems like just last week that we were 
>having lunch together,
>but you've already forgotten my name ...

Oh, hell. Im sorry, incipient dysnomia. My fingers were disconnected 
from my brain there. Apologies all round, I owe you a(nother) scotch.

>I never really saw the distinction between the Common Logic Group and the SCL
>group. I saw SCL as the best way to get the past the technical 
>hurdles that the larger
>group had been debating.

Well, OK. But I formed SCL to be lean and mean partly because CL 
seemed to have run into the sand, so (as you know) I am slightly 
concerned that SCL not be directly identified with CL.

>There seem to be two senses of the word "group" in this discussion.
>One is the group of technically-oriented people who have been thrashing out
>the technical details of the spec.

Well, not exactly. That makes it sound like this is a kind of 
skunkworks for a larger ISO group: whereas, in fact, this *is* the 
SCL group, and the entire ISO submission process is merely one 
potential application of SCL. I will be *very* unhappy if that 
activity makes substantial changes to SCL without consulting with me, 
or with people I trust.

>The other is the group of ISO representatives
>that will actually be voting on the document on its way to becoming 
>a standard.
>There has unfortunately been a large gap between these two groups. 
>One particular
>problem is that there are people in Australia and the UK who are interested in
>participating in the Common Logic project, but who have not been 
>able to contact
>their national bodies within ISO.

Clearly, ISO is a seriously clunky organization.  The other problem 
is that there is absolutely no way for the people in this group, ie 
the actual SCL group, who have the technical ability to actually 
write the standard, to take part in any ISO activities. I have to 
say, I am not myself particularly concerned with ISO, which is why I 
am quite happy for Harry to pick up this ball and run with it. 
However, the SCL group was formed, convened and named by me. Its 
members are members because I invited them to be members.  The basic 
technical semantic work on which it is based was done almost entirely 
by Chris Menzel and myself. I am far more concerned that these 
insights be adequately captured in an SCL exposition than I am in 
obtaining international consensus: if such consensus is unobtainable 
then I would prefer that the ISO process be aborted. Having no 
standard is far better than agreeing on a bad standard, and the world 
well get by without a uniform notation of FOL in any case.

Pat

>
>>>
>>? What working group?? Where was this 'like' expressed, and to whom?
>>
>>>the general organization of having the Common Logic core (now 
>>>called SCL) as part 1 of the standard, and then having KIF, CGIF, 
>>>and CLML as parts 2, 3 and 4 showing how all of the core can be 
>>>mapped to each particular language L. Parts 2, 3, and 4 should 
>>>each describe extensions to the languages that are NOT part of the 
>>>core as well. There can be informative (i.e., not prescriptive) 
>>>annexes that help further explain the languages.
>>
>>
>>This is not exactly the organization that I favor, and in fact it 
>>does not really make sense, since the concrete SCL syntaxes (KIF, 
>>CG etc) are not extensions to SCL.  There are two orthogonal 
>>issues: concretizing the abstract syntax in various ways, and 
>>restricting/extending the language in various ways. Particular 
>>concrete syntaxes may not support all language extensions.
>
>I have no idea where this proposal came from; it was not in the New Work Item
>proposal. I suspect that this is Sowa's idea.
>
>- michael


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