- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 11:59:07 -0600
- To: WebOnt <www-webont-wg@w3.org>, Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>
>The requirements document is still in progress, but if you want to look >at an interim version, please point your browser to: > >http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/owl/ > >During the telecon, we'll provide and update on the current status and >request help in specific areas. (As requested by Jim H in the telecon, some sentences regarding tagging/grouping/partitioning versus commitment. ) This was in response to Jim's remark that we need a way for one ontology to refer to a part of an ontology and commit to it. My point was that we should distinguish between the reference to a part of an ontology, and the commitment to the part so referenced, so that one can refer to a part of an ontology without automatically thereby assenting to it. One reason for emphasizing this point is that there are several use cases already (notably Jos deRoos' implementation of N3) where the 'grouping' technique is used to gather together a set of antecedents of an implication, so that one can say [all this stuff] log:implies [this other stuff]. More generally, however, I would suggest that we take care to keep functionally distinct aspects of the language as distinct as possible, and that referring to/pointing to/whatever some ontology ought to one thing, and any speech act (assenting, asserting, denying, questioning, expressing doubt about, saying it is connected to foo, saying it entails foo....) involving it should be something else. It would be OK to have a default case where if you just 'say' it without any further comment then that is taken to be an assertion (assention?), but it ought to be *very* easy to override that assumption. And I think it would be best to have an explicit 'we include this here' marker, like DAML's 'import'. Pat Hayes -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Thursday, 31 January 2002 12:58:42 UTC