From owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org Wed May 30 04:02:02 2007 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 07:00:42 -0400 From: Patrick Durusau Subject: INCITS-V1: Behavior, Semantics and Syntax Sender: owner-incits-v1@incits-v1.org To: incits-v1@incits-v1.org Reply-to: incits-v1@incits-v1.org X-Accept-Language: en-us, en X-PMX-Version: 5.2.0.264296 X-ASG-Debug-ID: 1180522884-686d00170000-E618Iy X-Barracuda-URL: http://10.10.100.8:8000/cgi-bin/mark.cgi X-Barracuda-Connect: unknown[66.110.197.207] X-Barracuda-Start-Time: 1180522884 X-ASG-Whitelist: Client X-ASG-Orig-Subj: Behavior, Semantics and Syntax X-Barracuda-Virus-Scanned: by Barracuda Spam Firewall at insimail.com Greetings! Tom Ngo mentioned yesterday his interest in DIS 29500 not specifying behavior or semantics. I find that deeply troubling and I would like to explore that issue in greater depth before our next meeting. I concede at the outset that being free to ignore the semantics of a markup standard certainly makes it easier for unanticipated uses to occur in the future and to still claim conformance to the "syntax" of the standard. But, let's consider a standard that isn't before us now as a neutral example. Consider UBL for instance. Certainly UBL defines a syntax, but it also defines semantics. And conforming UBL applications honor both. As Ken Holman notes in "Practical Universal Business Language Deployment": "...using an agreed-upon vocabulary ensures that all users of the XML can identify the same information items usng the agreed-upon labels..." When Ken uses the term "vocabulary" I read "semantics." That is to say that using any UBL conformant application, when it encounters the same UBL vocabulary item, not only does the application recognize the syntax but the semantics of that term. Hence, one has interoperability between UBL conformant applicatons. Contrast that with with syntactic but not semantic conformance. Sure, my UBL-syntactic conformant application can process the syntax but the semantics of what it is processing may be treated in such a way as to give me a completely different result from some other UBL-syntactic conformant application. I don't think that is how European governments are using UBL to save $millions of dollars every year from UBL. I freely admit that I have written markup standards (particularly for Bible encoding) where it would have been nice to duck the semantic issues and simply leave that up to the user. Would make writing standards in contentious domains a lot easier. But, the downside is a loss of interoperability between applications. Or to put it another way, interoperability requires both syntactic and semantic conformance. If in the future we want some other semantics, then we have to write another standard to reflect the new semantics. Is there any disagreement that not requiring semantic conformance diminishes interoperability? (Whether that is dispositive is a separate question. My goal here is to see how close or far apart on this issue.) Hope everyone is having a great day! Patrick -- Patrick Durusau Patrick@Durusau.net Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005 Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!