Re: Distributed querying on the semantic web

Peter F. Patel-Schneider writes:
 > 
 > In the absence of any indication to the
 > contrary, it is generally a good idea to have some mechanism that provides
 > a base mechanism for picking up information about terms.  However, why
 > should there not be a mechanism (such as owl:imports) that can be used by
 > the creator of a document to indicate where other information of terms used
 > in the document, including information that could be deemed to provide
 > `definitions' for terms in the document, can be found?

Because a lot of the time there *isn't* a document!

E.g. The information comes back as the result of a query against a
remote RDF store. This is method used for obtaining RDF data in all of
the semantic-web applications I've been involved in writing.

Cheers,

Phil