From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider (pfps@research.bell-labs.com)
Date: 09/07/01
I agree with Pat's points here. I would rather have had effort spent on semantics, analysis of reasoning, and examples. peter From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu> Subject: Re: Strawman DAML+OIL Query Language Proposal Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 07:51:31 -0700 > >Richard Fikes wrote: > > > > > > As I mentioned yesterday in the telecon, a student of mine, Yulin Li, > > > and I have designed a simple language for querying DAML+OIL knowledge > > > bases. The language is specified as a DAML+OIL ontology so that both > > > queries and the results obtained from asking a query are represented in > > > DAML+OIL. > > > >I appreciate the effort of specifying the language as a DAML+OIL > >ontology. > > Well, I wonder what the point of this effort was, and would like to > raise this as an issue for discussion. It seems to me to be: > > (a) completely pointless, in the strict sense that it provides no > useful functionality or understanding of the language (ie the query > language) to describe its syntax in DAML+OIL as opposed to, say, BNF. > All that this enables a hypothetical DAML reasoner to do is to parse > the expressions of the query language. Using an ontology language for > parsing seems a very poor design decision; at the least, one that > should be discussed on its merits rather than simply assumed to be > somehow a Good Thing. > > (b) actively misleading, in the sense that it suggests that the > purpose of DAML+OIL is to be a syntax specification language, which > as far as I was aware wasn't ever even close to the intended goal of > the project; > > (c) based on a basic misapprehension about the nature of descriptive > languages, in that part of the very idea of a *syntactic* > specification is that it describes domains of recursively defined > finite entities to which results such as the second recursion theorem > apply, whereas descriptive (assertional) languages like DAML+OIL (and > RDF and FOL) have an extensional semantics which is (because of > Goedel incompleteness) inherently unable to fully capture the notion > of finiteness or recursion.
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