Re: relative uri references

On 24 Nov 2008, at 15:44, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

> My only concern about having the structural specification only allow
> for absolute URIs is that it is common idiom to use relative URIs in
> imports statements.

I've never seen such. Ever, actually. Could you provide some pointers?

I mean, I see how it would work and why one would do that (just like  
relative URIs to imgs). But I've never seen it in OWL. Doesn't seem  
to be a particularly *common* idiom. As tools wouldn't have respected  
them before, by and large, since RDF absolutized, I'd be very  
surprised if people relied on that.

> Doing so allows one to move a hierarchy of
> ontologies from one place to another without having to rewrite all the
> import statements. If the structural specification only has absolute
> URIs and serializes a document that uses relative URIs in this way,
> that will no longer work as the resultant imports will use full URIs.

[snip]

Well, it does seem possible that an implementation will maintain  
various serialization specific information. Or, in fact, if you are  
going through a tool anyway, you could always reserialize to the new  
location.

Cheers,
Bijan.