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Re: [uos-convene] A common subset ontology?

To: Chris Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: Upper Ontology Summit convention <uos-convene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 12:19:35 -0800
Message-id: <440F3C57.4020407@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Chris,    (01)

XML and URIs are as "orthogonal" as anything could ever be.    (02)

JS>> Other than the choice of an XML-based syntax, there's nothing
 >> about RDF and OWL that makes them any better suited to the WWW
 >> than SQL.    (03)

CM> Well, that's a pretty big "other than"!  Creating an XML-based
 > language for publishing ontologies in which names are URIs was
 > genius.    (04)

If you want to talk about orthogonality, note that these three
ideas were developed independently and have been in widespread
use since the late 1960s:    (05)

  1. Importing external files into a language text.    (06)

  2. The Arpanet/Internet naming conventions for files.    (07)

  3. The GML-SGML-HTML-XML conventions for marking up
     documents.    (08)

The first two are very important, and using them together is a
"no-brainer", as they say.  The *ML family has also been a very
good approach for marking up documents for the past 37 years.    (09)

But the idea of using a document markup format as a general
purpose language format is questionable, to say the least.
An HTML/XML tag that specifies LANG=xxx has proved to be much
more versatile and successful; e.g., Javascript and PHP.    (010)

CM> And for all its superficial ugliness, a standardized XML-based
 > syntax cuts right through religious wars about surface grammatical
 > form.    (011)

Oh, please.  Just look at PHP.  Without any support from the W3C,
it rose from nowhere to become one of the major web development
languages -- and it does *not* use XML syntax for the processing
language.    (012)

The other major development today is AJAX, which uses Javascript
for the language and XML tags for the data (which was the original
intent behind GML, SGML, and HTML).    (013)

CM> Well, being able to call a DB via a web server and actually
 > having a language tailored to the web are two quite different
 > things -- as you know, of course.  And of course there is work
 > being done on such languages in W3C.    (014)

So far, the evidence shows that the ideal method of "tailoring"
a language to the web is to have an XML or HTML tag that says
"LANG=xxx".  The idea of using an XML-based syntax for the language
itself has proved to be enormously inefficient, horribly unreadable,
and so poorly implemented that people use other systems (e.g. Prolog)
instead of the native XML-based utilities.    (015)

John    (016)

PS:  But I will admit that XUL has turned out to be a good language
for implementing browser-based GUIs.  However, it took the Netscape
team so long to implement a workable version of XUL that they lost
the browser wars to MSFT.    (017)

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