=?UTF-8?Q?Re=3A_=5Bxml=2Ddev=5D_The_semantics_of_an_XML_document_is_?==?

[Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

It is handy sometimes, as happened with UBL, for a group to define formally the logic of the semantics of your particular XML language. UBL had the UBL Ontolog Forum, then later a technical committee sought to standardise an OWL ontology definition for UBL. I was later a contributor to a paper about how XML (or equivalent) standards might one day be designed using formal ontologies 

(http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~yjc32/project/ref-BM%20ontology/ref%20onto%20for%20eBusiness/onto%20for%20eBuss%20standards.pdf). Maybe someday it will happen. Till then it might be that ontological analysis will only be a luxury afforded to the more ubiquitous XML languages. I did imagine that a general analysis of common features of XML languages such as the semantic logic implied by containing elements, sequences, etcetera, might happen eventually. We owe natural language sentence grammar logic analysis to Aristotle and many who continued his work. Why not have similar analysis on documents of XML or JSON? Are they ubiquitous enough?

On Sat, 8 Jan 2022 at 13:04, Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

Hi Folks,

The semantics of an XML document is determined by the actions taken on the XML document.

Consider this XML document:

<airplane-flight>
    <duration units="hours">1</duration>
    <speed units="kilometers-per-hour">500</speed>
</airplane-flight>

What is its semantics?

Answer: it has no semantics because it has no actions.

Pair up the XML document with actions that compute duration * speed (i.e., distance traveled by the airplane flight):

The semantics of the XML document is: 500

Pair up the XML document with different actions and it has different semantics:

Now the semantics of the XML document is: 310.686

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Wicked cool!

Comments?

/Roger

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Stephen D Green