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

My view is that an explicit extra-logical imports is a relatively easy thing
to specify, and relatively easy to implement.  An implicit imports or, even
worse, an implicit abide-by-the-intended-meaning, is, on the other hand,
much harder to specify and potentially very much harder to implement.

peter




From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
Subject: RE: LANG: need to CLOSE Issue 5.6 Imports as magic syntax
Date: 29 Oct 2002 16:30:49 -0600


> On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 16:07, Smith, Michael K wrote:
> > 
> > 2 more cents.
> > 
> > > 3) The imports triples are considered extra-logical, and any statements
> > > that contain owl:imports as a subject or object are undefined.
> > > Furthermore, any imports statements that have a resource other than the
> > > containing document as a subject are undefined.
> > 
> > OK.  
> > 
> > > 2) The semantics essentially be "A imports B means if B entails P then A
> > > entails P." ...
> > 
> > Imports is extra-logical by 3.  It has no formal semantics.  
> > 
> > I know what you are trying to get at, I just don't think we have
> > figured out how to say it.
> 
> I find some of the recent design discussion interesting, and
> I'm still mulling over the 9Oct suggestion from Hayes...
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Oct/0057.html
> 
> but I just ran this by my colleagues again, and my position
> is still that we should POSTPONE this issue; take
> it out of owl until the next version.
> 
> Imports is really quite different from the rest of the
> terms in our spec. The other terms, like FunctionalProperty
> and such, refer to pretty crisp mathematical notions
> that can be translated to first order logic (or
> axiomatized or whatever). Even with the 9Oct suggestion
> from Hayes to give a formal specification for imports
> involves a pretty substantial change to the interpretation
> structure.
> 
> Peter noted the connection to the RDF concepts material
> on "social meaning" of RDF documents; I'm more optimistic
> about that material than he is, but I agree that it's pretty immature.
> I'd like to get a lot more implementation experience in
> this design space before I commit to Recommendation level
> support for it.
> 
> I hope folks will consider whether they could live
> without a standardized design for this feature for
> a year or so.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
>

Received on Tuesday, 29 October 2002 17:52:45 UTC