Goals of this Group
To create:
- A very expressive interchange language between heterogeneous
systems;
- An ASCII and human readable "plain vanilla" notation for logic;
- A kind of general-purpose logic kit, easily configurable to a
variety of machine- and human- oriented uses while preserving
semantic
clarity.
To be potentially used:
- for translation between other kinds of notations for people with
different
needs or preferences.
Examples: traditional infix notation for
predicate calculus, conceptual graphs, controlled natural
languages, etc.;
- in expressing the SUO;
- for defining the meaning (semantics?) of languages;
- as input and output to various inference engines;
- in the emerging internet ontology community;
- as an exercise in writing a first-order model theory.
That should:
- be human readable,
- be as general-purpose as is feasible while having a sharp
first-order
semantics;
- be computationally as well-described and tractable as possible;
- provide subcases with known computational properties wherever
possible;
- be sensitive to other emerging standards, in particular the
semantic web and
e-commerce areas, which will include things like:
- Unicode compliance (note that the language will be specified in
ASCII,
unicode compliance will mean only that user-defined symbols can
be in
unicode);
- an XML syntactic version;
- a basic competence with URIs and modules;
- NOT express arbitrary restrictions that arise from any particular
domain of
application, as these will only create problems for some potential
user;
- do for logical ontology languages what XML has done for markup;
