ontolog-forum
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ontolog-forum] What goes into a Lexicon?

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "doug foxvog" <doug@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:03:00 -0500
Message-id: <47d992b029c0d49a6a48c42af714a9b4.squirrel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Sun, February 26, 2012 19:31, Paul Tyson" <phtyson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ...
>
> So W3C's grudge against LISPish notation was not only aimed at RDF; they
> chose to re-implement in XML notation, at some loss of functionality, a
> perfectly good Scheme-like transformation specification. But after all,
> XML is just uglified s-expressions. And LISP's power comes not from
> parenthesized lists alone, but from a very large language specification
> that says how to interpret those lists. So maybe we're not in such a bad
> state after all.
>
> Your assertion that RDF is flawed because it was not done LISPishly
> puzzles me. RDF is an abstract syntax that constrains your utterances to
> triples,    (01)

Forcing triples is non-LISPish & quite constraining.    (02)

> forces you to use URIs as the first two components,    (03)

LISP does not have this constraint.    (04)

> and suggests some
> weak semantics that include interpreting the components of
> a triple as grammatical subject, predicate, and object. You can write
> your triples any way you care to--the W3C provided a starter set of
> concrete syntaxes, and is adding more. How would LISP have rectified the
> specification?    (05)

LISP does not restrict one to triples.  It also allows predicates on
datatype values.    (06)

Sure, you can convert lists to nested sets of triples:
  (pred  ARG1 ARG2 ARG3 ARG4 ARG5) =>
  (pred ARG1 (list ARG2 (list ARG3 (list ARG4 ARG5))))
-- and then make it 10 times a long if you want to put it in XML.    (07)

Such formatting makes rules a lot harder for a human to express
or read.  At least this human.    (08)

-- doug f    (09)

>...
>
> Regards,
> --Paul    (010)


_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J    (011)

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>