Re: LANG: need to CLOSE Issue 5.6 Imports as magic syntax

I've been catching up on the "imports" debate.
I understand that one option is to have only "implicit imports"
(ie anytime you refer to some SomeURI#Foo, all contents from someURI is
merged with the current graph).

But I cannot understand how this will allow me to do the following
elementary scenario:

- at location someURI1, someone defines (say) the domain of SomeURI1#Prop1
- at location someURI2, someone defines (say) the range of SomeURI1#Prop1
  (this may be an extension of the original ontology, or an update, etc)
  (We agree that a great feature of DAML+OIL was the possibility to
   take identifiers from other ontologies,
   and make further statements about them,
   which is exactly what's going on here).
- Now I want to use someURI1#Prop1 in my own ontology,
  and I want to exploit both its domain and range definitions
  (in other words, I like the extension made at someURI2)

So I simply use someURI1#Prop1, which gets me the all info from that location.
This gets me the domain definition of someURI1#Prop1.

QUESTION: without an explicit imports construct,
          how can I ever use the contents of someURI2,
          which contains the range definition of someURI1#Prop1 ?

I find this question so obvious that I fear it will have been answered
before by the proponents of the "no import in OWL-v1", and I have
probably just missed the answer to this. If so, please can someone point me
to it?

This answer is so important to me because I could not live with OWL if the
above scenario were not possible. Note: there is nothing fuzzy here 
concerning
trust, commitment, asserting-or-not, etc. I just want to understand how I can
specify to my reaoner from which premises it should draw its conclusions.

Frank.
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Received on Sunday, 10 November 2002 05:41:32 UTC