Subject: formal methods: AtomOwl

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 14:18:37 +0100

A week ago I attended the W3C Technical Plenary Week in Cannes  
(France). There was an very interesting session on Formal Methods at  
the W3C [1]. The specs that had benefited from working with formal  
methods were:

	- XQuery
         - OWL and RDf
         - Web Services Choreography and Web Services Descriptions  
(using pi notation)
	- WSDL 2.0 (using Z notation)

In some cases parts of the formalization became the authoritative  
work, in others they only had a guiding and clarifying role, and the  
english text remained the authoritative work. But in every case the  
feeling was that the formal backing helped work out a lot of problems  
that were difficult to notice in the natural language text.

	Now each of the formal methods languages used is in the end back by  
Set Theory, which RDF and OWL and other semantic web enterprises are  
based on. My suggestion was therefore that RDF/OWL could itself be a  
formal language one can use to help explicate various standards.

	The work being done by the AtomOwl group could then be understood to  
simply be a formalization of the work done by the atom syntax and APP  
groups, where the spec release by these groups remain the  
authoritative texts. The advantage of the Semantic Web languages over  
these other formalisms is that it is much more widely understood, is  
web centric, and furthermore has some very interesting direct  
practical applications. AtomOwl [2] could for example be directly  
used to help create Sparql end points for aggregators [3], as well as  
being used directly as a data model as BlogEd does [4].

	It is in this light that I am looking to set W3C Working Group (or  
XG) to create a standard ontology for Atom. As a formalization of  
Atom it will have to be faithful to the specs released by these IETF  
groups, which as stated, remain authoritative. There is interest from  
IBM,  Talis Information and Sun Microsystems, three members of the  
W3C to work on this. If other members would like to join we would be  
more than happy. We would be very interested to hear from other  
members of the Atom group on how we can proceed to make the resulting  
spec be of the highest possible quality. Ideally we would like to  
place the resulting document at the Atom namespace location with some  
(XSLT?) transform that would be the default transform from atom to RDF.

	We are very open on what the best way to proceed is.

	Yours sincerely,

	Henry Story

	Sem Web Researcher, Sun Microsystems
	http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/

[1] Session 7: Adventures in Formal Methods
     http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html
[2] http://bblfish.net/work/atom-owl/2005-10-23/
[3] see http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PaceSparqlLink
[4] https://bloged.dev.java.net/