[om-list] System Design

[Mark Butler]

Hello everybody,

  Although I think we all have different ideas of what features we think are
important / necessary, there do not appear to be any show stoppers. The first
important thing is that entities do not need formal names.  Formal names /
namespaces are primarily useful from a system perspective for linking models
together.

I like the idea of a human readable export format, but parsing one is
certainly considerably harder than a more conventional format, so I suppose we
should use a conventional format as the primary one.  I am very interested in
computer language design and was trying to kill two birds with one stone with
a human read/write-able format.

A decent general purpose structure for a first class symbolic representation
system is that used by LISP, roughly a list of nodes where any node can be a
value, an embedded list or a reference to another list. 

A LISPy meta-meta-model has the advantage of having a long history in the
knowledge representation field.  I do not really want to program in LISP or
Scheme, but I am not aware of any better alternatives for an arbitary symbolic
data structure.  Any other suggestions?

- Mark