[sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

[Jaeho Lee]

Hello all,	

	Robert Barta [rho at devc.at] wrote: 
	> If I look again at

   	> http://www.semagia.com/tmp/ctm-comparison.html

	> then the left column is clearly more closely to natural language.
And
	> you yourself mentioned in an earlier post that you like to see
this
	> move.

Let me add one point here that hasn't been discussed so far. 
There are many different kinds of natural language other than English and
many topic maps will be written in various words in different languages.

If the topic maps on the left column in the comparison list are written, for
example in Korean, it would be really cryptic because it doesn't give enough
clue to distinguish between associations and topics. 
To me and probably to people in other cultures, the left column is HORRIFIC
to read.
Structural boundaries such as semi-colons are definitely needed for
readability, IMHO, even in English.

I cannot agree more with the statement by Steve Pepper, "But for most people
(and I contend that most (human) readers and writers of CTM fall into this
category) the semi-colons will be useful as an aid to understanding the
content, even though they might introduce some redundancy, because they mark
the major structural boundaries within a topic block."

---
 Jaeho Lee, 
 The University of Seoul

-----Original Message-----
From: sc34wg3-bounces at isotopicmaps.org
[mailto:sc34wg3-bounces at isotopicmaps.org] On Behalf Of Robert Barta
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 1:59 AM
To: Discussion of ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps
Subject: Re: [sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 02:12:41PM +0100, Steve Pepper wrote:
> Perhaps you misunderstood.
>
> My point is that the semi-colons are indeed "unnecessary" *for
> parsers* (and parser writers, and people like you who think in
> terms of "modern languages").
>
> But for most people (and I contend that most (human) readers and
> writers of CTM fall into this category) the semi-colons will be
> useful as an aid to understanding the content, even though they
> might introduce some redundancy, because they mark the major
> structural boundaries within a topic block.
>
> These people, not the programmers, are our primary audience for
> CTM, and their needs - optimal readability - should be our major
> concern. That, at least, was the Working Group's position at the
> Kyoto meeting.

Here is why your argumentation completely derails me:

I quite agree with you that our target audience should be not such
much the Java|Lisp|Prolog|Python|Perl programmers, but more the
computer savvy knowledge worker. But all syntax _you_ propose (curly
brackets, semicolons around every corner, commas, ...) seems all to
originate from a classical programming world.

If I look again at

   http://www.semagia.com/tmp/ctm-comparison.html

then the left column is clearly more closely to natural language. And
you yourself mentioned in an earlier post that you like to see this
move.

\rho
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