[SCL] RDF in an SCL world

[John F. Sowa]

Murray,

That is silly:

 > 3. Wait until SCL is actually available before doing
 > any tossing.

First-order logic has been around for 125 years, and
during that time the semantics of the essential core
has not changed in the slightest.

That core of FOL, as expressed in KIF, CGs, and many
other notations, has been in use for the overwhelming
majority of applications, and SCL is not changing it
at all.

SQL is an example of an immensely successful version
of logic, whose loose ends compared to SCL are legion.
If you restrict your usage to the clean core of SQL
(which lies in the intersection of the implementations
by Oracle, IBM, Sybase, Ingres, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and
Microsoft), you have a very powerful language that is
very stable and interoperable with every implementation.

I fully agree with the need to tidy up the loose ends
so that every implementation is fully compatible with
every other one.  But the example of SQL (or C or C++
or Java or whatever) demonstrates that it is possible
to live with the common core of a language quite
effectively even during the period of reconstruction
(which for most computer languages is their entire
lifetime until they fall out of use altogether).

The major problem with RDF and OWL is that they don't
come close to supporting even the common core of SQL,
let alone full FOL or SCL.

John