[SCL] RDF in an SCL world

[Murray Altheim]

Bill Andersen wrote:
> On Jul 16, 2004, at 2:21 AM, Murray Altheim wrote:
> 
> 
>>John F. Sowa wrote:
>>
>>>Bill,
>>>There are two strategies for handling relations with
>>>more than 2 arguments in RDF:
>>>  1. If you have a relation R with N arguments, treat
>>>     R as an entity that is connected to each of its
>>>     actual arguments by binary connectives named
>>>     Arg1, Arg2, ..., ArgN.
>>>  2. Toss the RDF software in the trashcan and use SCL.
>>>I recommend strategy #2, but you can go with #1 if
>>>forced into it.
>>
>>There's also #3:
>>
>>    3. Wait until SCL is actually available before doing any tossing.
> 
> 
> Gotta go with Murray on this one.  We (Ontology Works) will use SCL 
> internally, as we have always planned, but I have no illusion that many 
> of our customers will use it outside the box.  Fact is that many 
> commercial OWL-driven systems (when they come) will emit RDF.  Products 
> will be written that will expect RDF at the interface.  So, we need to 
> provide some mechanism to play in this world.

John,

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with SCL, except that as a
usable specification it's simply *not finished*. I suspect it will be
soon, but until it is, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go tossing
things out the door until there is actually a replacement. And given
that it's very likely that those contemplating tossing out RDF will be
expecting an XML serialization of SCL, they'll have to wait for that
too. Given that last time I talked with Pat Hayes I was still on board
to assist with the XML-ization of SCL and he hasn't contacted me yet,
I'm assuming that (unless someone else has done the work and I'm as
yet unaware) that the XML version of SCL (which I've been calling XCL)
is still in the wings. When that is publicly available, and stable,
then people can being considering it as a reasonable alternative to RDF.

And at that time, I sincerely hope it is.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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