Hi John, (01)
I see now where I have misunderstood you. When you say W3C specs that
use normative XML definitions are overly complex, defective, or useless,
you apparently mean "for direct use by logic programmers", that is, for
preparing data instances to feed to a Prolog process or theorem prover.
(In 30 years of supporting aerospace engineering and manufacturing
processes I have not once encountered a professional logician or pure
logic programmer employed in the industry, so this interpretation of
your statements did not come readily to mind.) (02)
I agree. But: 1) I don't think any of the specs in the W3C semantic
technology stack are aimed directly at supporting academic researches in
logic programming and theorem proving; 2) it is trivial to
down-translate XML to any leaner notation for specialized processing, or
to a display format as an aid to understanding; and 3) the overall
benefits of representing enterprise knowledge in XML far outweigh the
cost of the extra markup. (03)
Regards,
--Paul (04)
On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 01:51 -0500, John F Sowa wrote:
> Paul,
>
> Have you ever tried to do long division with Roman numerals?
>
> PT
> > And what, specifically, about XML disqualifies it for the purpose
> > of encoding and transmitting these arrangements, particularly when
> > if you aim at the largest possible scope of people, platforms,
> > programs, and persistence (i.e., web-scale and enterprise-worthy)?
>
> You can represent numbers in many different ways. All of them are
> equally precise and equally suitable for transmitting the data.
>
> But if you have to do any kind of computation with those numbers,
> you need a notation whose structure reflects the structure of
> the fundamental relationships among those numbers in as clean,
> simple, and direct a manner as possible.
>
> Computationally, binary notation happens to be the most efficient
> for a digital computer. But it is hard to read by people.
>
> If people had eight fingers on each hand, hex notation would be
> great as a compact way to group bits in a readable way. But since
> most of us have five fingers on each hand, we've learned to count up
> to ten very early in life. Therefore, we adopt a system based on
> ten for human use with a translation to binary for computers.
>
> For logic, the algebraic notation for logic is based on Boole's
> analogy between the arithmetic operators for +, x, - and the logical
> operators of 'or', 'and', 'not'. That is the basis for most linear
> notations for logic, which have a clean, simple mapping to the basic
> logic words of English and other NLs.
>
> There are also good analogies between the operations of logic and
> various graph-based operations. Graphs are widely used for logic.
>
> But the XML-based representations, which are good for annotating and
> formatting documents, obscure rather than clarify the logic. Their
> verbosity makes them bloated and inefficient for humans and computers.
>
> The large number of alternative notations is a bad sign: nobody invents
> multiple notations for well-designed languages.
>
> John
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> 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
> (05)
_________________________________________________________________
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 (06)
|