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

[pat hayes]

>On Friday, October 31, 2003, at 06:41  AM, Tanel Tammet wrote:
>>>>A working Draft (WD) needs to be submitted to WG2 for comments. 
>>>>It will be called ISO/IEC WD 24707. It must conform to ISO 
>>>>formatting standards, which basically means using a Word 
>>>>template. In order to get the process rolling, we will need a 
>>>>working draft for the INCITS L8 meeting in Washington on 17 Dec 
>>>>2003.
>>>Suppose we do not make this deadline: what is the next possible date?
>>
>>I see no immediate reason to skip this deadline on purpose:
>>we have a realistic chance of making it, if we try.
>
>That is my feeling exactly!

I have at best one week free time between now and Dec 17.  But by all 
means let us try.

I suggest carving up the work.

I will try to have a readable intro/outline by early next week, using 
Tamel's draft, and will work on conformance requirement statements 
and some kind of useable meta-notation for the AS that doesn't 
involve Greek subscripts.

Chris, can you put comment wrappers, the 'roles' atom syntax option, 
and restricted quantifiers into the abstract syntax.  Note that roles 
are unordered, so we will need a set-like construct in the abstract 
syntax (?)

John, can you focus on providing an SCL-abstract-syntax version of 
CGs? If you don't need seqvars, don't use them: in fact, I think its 
an interesting question how 'small' a subset of SCL-AS is needed to 
cover all of CG syntax: if it turns out to be exactly the SCL-FOL 
subset that would be great. (Do CGs require that functions be 
declared explicitly and have a fixed arity?)

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.  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.

Harry, can you let us know what ISO conventions we are required to 
conform to? Organization that must be satisfied, required section 
headings, what sections of the document MUST be provided, etc? (Any, 
by the way, you can smile at having whipped us.)

If anyone has anything they feel would be valuable or even helpful on 
any topic, please post/send it ASAP.

If nobody has any negative comments or alternative suggestions 
regarding the proposals in
http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/scl/2003-July/000304.html
http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/scl/2003-July/000307.html
then these will be included more or less in the form indicated.  As 
the lady on the TV auction says, fair warning....

Pat


>
>>
>>>>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.
>>
>>In case Harry could help pushing SCL draft standard (assuming
>>we make it in time) to be the CL draft standard, this
>>would be a good thing, IMHO. Of course, it is not at
>>all clear this will work out, but maybe it will.
>
>On the one hand as Pat says, it's been five years, what's another year or two?

I was intending to be humorous at that point. I am acutely aware of 
the need for speed: the W3C process needs SCL *right now*.

>My answer is: it's another year or two! If the draft were in 
>almost-perfect shape for ISO right now, it would probably be 18 
>months to two years before it actually becomes a standard. So 2005 
>is the earliest it could happen. Wait another year for a reasonable 
>draft and you have 2006, and so on...  how old do we want to be when 
>the standard is finally approved?
>
>>
>>I will volunteer to do the translation to Word if this
>>Word thing turns out to be a barrier :-)
>
>I will gladly take you up on this offer, and send you the ISO 
>templates when I get them.

Please send them to us all, in fact. I can probably adapt to them if 
I really have to :-)

>
>>
>>>>I consider it vital to reach consensus
>>>It is vital that we reach agreement, not necessarily consensus 
>>>agreement. To achieve consensus in this group may well be 
>>>impossible and is almost certainly NP-hard.
>>
>>Right, but we can aim towards consensus by specifying
>>the lowest common denominator, and not putting extra
>>stuff or extra complexities into the core.
>
>This is exactly the attitude that will get us a standard sooner, not 
>later! Unfortunately as we all know, it is easier said than done.


Quite. SCL was cut out from CL by exactly this perspective: but we 
need also to be careful not to make the core so that it cannot be 
extended, by accident.

Harry, as ISO guy, suppose we had a document which was ISO-kosher but 
had some sections missing or incomplete, would that be a disaster? 
That may be more realistic as a Dec-17 aim for me.

Pat


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