[tmcl-wg] Consistency of TMCL Schemas ?

[Bernard Vatant]

I'd not looked at the TMCL requirements document for a while, but returned
to it today, still trying to figure out what could be the advantages of
using TMCL schemas (whenever they are there) vs using OWL ontologies (which
are there already) to constrain topic maps.

Besides specific details (you can express this, you can't express that)
there is something I just figured out and that suddenly strikes me as a big
flaw in the requirements document. Nowhere is expressed that a TMCL schema
should be internally logically consistent, IOW that all constraints in a
given schema taken together do not entail contradictions.

Since among the requirements is the capacity to express complex constraints
using logical connectors and quantifiers, seems to me that such a
requirement of logical consistency should be a must. Before checking
something to be consistent against a set of rules, one should be able to
check if the set of rules is consistent.

Remind you that OWL, or at least OWL-DL, provides such features, and that
it was not easy stuff to build. And TMCL pretends to handle some logical
constructs way more complex than those one could express in OWL.

So ?

Bernard

Bernard Vatant
Senior Consultant
Knowledge Engineering
Mondeca - www.mondeca.com
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com