Re: RDFS compatibility information in OWL-DL documents

Bijan,
> In practice, owl:imports (and owl:Ontology) are just magic syntax. 
> Thinking of them as a property and a class and wondering if they get 
> the modeling "right" is hugely pointless and counterproductive. 
> owl:imports is definitely  not flexible enough for what people want to 
> do in building their ontologies (we need something like an XML Catalog 
> or schemaLocation  or something better as well, because people want to 
> work with private variants but not have their URIs all screwed up).
Fair enough, let's put if owl:imports gets right or not aside.  It is a 
side point.

But what I really want to know is what kind of meaning, in terms of RDF 
graphs, a simple statement like

_:x a http://example.com/o1#A .

convey?  If it only conveys what it says (as you said most RDF reasoners 
do).  Then how can I instruct the reasoner to include additional 
statement stored elsewhere? Should I use owl:imports? Then would a 
reasoner reject my statement since there is no owl:Ontology header? Or 
should I use rdfs:isDefinedBy, rdfs:seeAlso? If so, where is it specified?

When writing ontologies, it, of course, doesn't matter.  I can just use 
owl:imports in case the reasoner only support explicit import.  But when 
I am writing plain RDF statements, such as a personal profile, don't I 
have to know what it means to a reasoner before I write something?  On 
the other hand, if I am to write a RDF/OWL based agents, don't I have to 
know the exact model to work satisfactorily.

I am sorry this thread side-stepped into the design of owl:imports and 
owl:Ontology.  But the trigger is Alan's proposal on a conditional 
rdfs:imports.  Hence, I was saying that  we should clarify the "default" 
import model first before adding new tag?  But it still seems a haze to 
me what should be is the standard practice.

Cheers,

Xiaoshu

Received on Thursday, 19 April 2007 17:40:37 UTC