Re: SUO: OMG, UML and Ontologies
Adam Pease <apease@ks.teknowledge.com>:
>Francis,
> I'm not sure where our disagreement lies then. Maybe in fact we
>agree. Let me try to restate some points which I believe are tied
>together.
>
>1. Logical languages like KIF are very expressive and ensure that
>we can define precisely the semantics of the terms on our ontology.
>
>2. Logical languages like KIF can be translated easily into less
>expressive forms such as XML or UML.
Er...that isnt quite true. These less expressive forms can be
translated into KIF, but not (in general) the reverse. What is true
is that anything that can be said in UML (etc.) can be said in KIF,
or automatically translated into KIF.
XML isnt really in the same league since it has no semantics: it is
really only a notation for arbitrary labelled directed graph
structures. KIF can be directly rendered into XML-compliant syntax in
several ways, of which the most obvious is to replace each pair of
nested ( ) brackets with XML start and end tags <....> </...>
labelled with the syntactic class of the KIF expression.
<Metacomment> Why anyone would actually prefer this barbaric
clumsiness is beyond my comprehension, but apparently many people do.
Perhaps their heads don't have enough capacity to maintain a pushdown
stack? </Metacomment> I believe there is a standardisation effort
under way right now to settle on a generally useful such notational
convention for XML-KIF.
>3. Many people are not familiar with KIF and so they should be able
>to work with the SUO in a language in which they feel comfortable.
The very real problems the SUO faces will not be made any easier or
more difficult by the choice of notation, which should be a minor
matter that we could profitably ignore on this listing. As you know,
Adam (having done a good deal of it yourself :-) there is a great
deal of work now in hand on translations between alternative
notations, most of which can be done mechanically.
Pat Hayes
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