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Re: [ontology-summit] The tools are not the problem (yet)

To: ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 20:46:12 -0500
Message-id: <52EDA364.9070307@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Paul,    (01)

Your note of Jan 24 was buried in a ton of notes in this thread.  But I
just wanted to comment on the following exchange:    (02)

JFS
>> But many voters in the W3C were in the grip of an untested ideology
>> -- the use of XML as a wrapper for knowledge representation languages.    (03)

PT
> Untested? 30+ years of experience, starting with IBM's internal use
> and transitioning to an ISO standard (SGML) in widespread use for
> large-scale publishing, and then universal deployment on the WWW in
> the guise of HTML? What would you consider "tested"? Maybe ASCII?    (04)

I am *very* familiar with the *ML family of languages.  In the early
1970s, I was working at IBM, just down the hall from Charlie Goldfarb.
He introduced me to GML for word processing.  Today, I still prefer
to edit HTML tags for word processing instead of using MS Word.
(I use OpenOffice or LibreOffice to convert HTML to .doc or .pdf.)    (05)

In the late 1980s, I was working on standards for computational
linguistics, and I *recommended* SGML for annotating texts.  I
still recommend the *ML notations for that purpose.    (06)

But there is a *huge* difference between annotating texts and doing
knowledge representation.  In the 1990s, XML was *untested* technology
as a notation for kn. rep.  The exercise with RDF/XML and OWL/XML
notation has demonstrated that using XML for that purpose was a
major *blunder*.    (07)

Google went back to the lightweight RDFa as a bridge between the
annotation and JSON for knowledge representation.  And guess what?
JSON is just LISP with brackets and curly braces.    (08)

John    (09)

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