[sc34wg3] TR: comment - RDFTM: Survey of Interoperability Proposals

[Murray Altheim]

Martin Bryan wrote:
> Murray
> 
>>Pat Hayes is certainly one of more well-respected logicians
>>around, and for any serious work I'm putting my money on the
>>Common Logic project, of which Pat, John Sowa, Chris Welty
>>and a few others are writing up for submission to ISO. Pat
>>does not consider things like SWRL serious contenders to CL [3]
>>so if people want to point to Pat as the expert, I suggest we
>>do the same and use what Pat would recommend, which would be
>>Common Logic. The CL work is being edited by Harry Delugach
>>and is expected to go out for ballot within SC32 this summer.
> 
> 
> I see CL is going to be presented at the forthcoming W3C Workshop on Rule
> Languages for Interoperability to be held 27-28 April in Washington, DC,
> USA? Are there any formal ISO documents out for review? If so can they be
> made available to WG3 before the Amsterdam meeting?

No, the copies available are currently only for those involved
in the development of the document itself, i.e., it's up to
Pat and Harry Delugach, the editor.

>>I'm doing my part in that effort in working with Pat to make
>>sure we have identifiers for all CL concepts so that we can
>>bring CL semantics into a Topic Map, just as we can likewise
>>bring in a Conceptual Graphs model or any other. As Bernard
>>is certain to know, it's also possible to bring in OWL
>>semantics into a Topic Map.
>
> As I am working more with OWL than with topic maps these days I'd be
> interested in reviewing this effort. Is there anything public yet?

If you're talking about the OWL work, I'll let Bernard answer. As
for CL-in-TM, that's still to be determined by a more definitive
draft of CL. I think April to early May before that's even possible.

>>This fallacy that some kind of
>>"formal model" needs exist before Topic Maps might be "taken
>>seriously by formalists" is a pretty silly argument. RDF was
>>able to tack on a model years after it was a W3C Recommenda-
>>tion, and I don't see as a consequence that it's being taken
>>any more seriously by the formalists I know.
> 
> The fallacy that a formal model helps produce a user-friendly rule language
> also needs killing. Yes, you can define a rules language mathematically. No,
> you can't make users understand it. Unless you come up with a simple-to-use
> UI for a rule language it will not fly. Schematron rules work because they
> are simplistic: a couple of hours and anyone with XML/XPath/XSLT can get
> basic cross-checks working, even if you can't logically prove anything from
> them.

Agreed.

>>But if we need any "answer" to this question, I see no reason
>>why Topic Maps can't do the same, but by summer we can choose
>>a better basis in Common Logic. There'll be mappings from CL
>>to most other things, like Pat's RDF Semantics, CGs and KIF
>>(probably even to PowerPoint and the iPod). At that point if
>>we map CL to TMs, we'll have a formal basis for doing RDF/OWL
>>conversions to and from Topic Maps. As formal as anyone else,
>>and it will eventually have the benefit of also being an ISO
>>standard.
> 
> 
> Now that is something worth working on.

Yes, and I think we'll see a consensus around that once the
documents are stable and publicly available. Hopefully not
very much longer, as the heat is on.

Murray

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

  Sometimes things are so obvious that they merely need pointing out:

       LATEST NEWS : MAJORITY OF TEENS DON’T WANT TO HAVE SEX
       Abstinence Clearinghouse
       http://www.abstinence.net/library/index.php?entryid=1808