Re: [ontolog-forum] [uk-government-data-developers] OMG Issues RFP for L

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John, 

You wrote:

The worst possible solution is to define a syntactic interchange
method for systems whose semantics were independently defined.
Unless and until somebody has proved that the semantic foundations
are identical, one must assume that they are incompatible.

Agreed. 

 I'd like to point out [1] that this is also a key issue for the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) work at W3C.

                                  Cheers,  -- Adrian

[1]  http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/paper/19

Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English over SQL and RDF
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Adrian Walker
Reengineering

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 9:36 PM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jim,

Your note raises some serious concerns about the RFP.

JR> I think this effort may be premature. At ISWC this year, Pat Hayes

 > issued a call to substantially revise RDF in a way that is upwardly
 > compatible and which resolves several outstanding problems with the
 > representation. The most severe of these problems has resulted in
 > the creation of several new languages on top of RDF (OWL is an
 > example) whose semantics are not compatible with the base semantics
 > of RDF. In other words, RDF is being used as an interchange format.

In the olden days, people used to define new syntax without any
thought about the semantics.  Now they learned how to define a
semantics for their syntax, but they ignore the differences with
the semantics of other systems that must interoperate with it.

JR> While I think Cory's proposal is very much in the right direction,

 > I would like to see the outcome of the debate on Pat's proposals
 > before committing to creating yet another semantic representation
 > on top of RDF.

Yes, indeed.  Note the following excerpt from Cory's note:

CC> The OMG (www.omg.org <http://www.omg.org/>) is the premier standards

 > organization for modeling, middleware and architecture. OMG standards
 > include UML, BPMN, UPDM (UML Profile for DoDAF), SoaML, SysML,
 > Ontology Definition Metamodel, Model Driven Architecture (MDA),
 > Records Management, Corba and may others. All of these modeling
 > standards are based on the "Meta Object Facility" (MOF) which uses
 > the XMI interchange format for model interoperability.

That's a lot of alphabet soup with many independently developed
notations, but no common semantics for them.  Some of them have
semantic specifications, but as far as I know, nobody has proved
that all their semantic foundations are identical.

The worst possible solution is to define a syntactic interchange
method for systems whose semantics were independently defined.
Unless and until somebody has proved that the semantic foundations
are identical, one must assume that they are incompatible.

John

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