- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 08:45:47 -0400
- To: "Jeff Heflin" <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>
- Cc: <www-webont-wg@w3.org>
Jeff Heflin wrote: > > Although imports could be treated syntactically (kind of like a > "#include" directive), I think that would be a big mistake. The point > of imports is that knowledge from another source applies to the resource > in which it is expressed. The Semantic Web is fundamentally about > distributed ontologies and data sources, and as such its semantics > should discuss these things explicitly. A syntactic fix obscures one of > the things that differentiates the Semantic Web from traditional logic > approaches. Ontologies and the interrelationships between them are > important; they aren't just things to be swept under the rug. It is one thing to produce a language that is capable of talking about ontologies and it seems that to the extent we can talk about an given owl:Ontology, we can say whatever is needed. "owl:import" is a different issue, and I'm not sure that we need _both_ mechanisms. That is to say the so-called "extralogical" assertions ought be encoded my one mechanism, namely owl:Ontology. Perhaps if there was a good and simple and specific use case that _requires_ owl:import to have semantics, I'd be better convinced that we can't just handle it syntactically, e.g. via XML Include. Jonathan
Received on Wednesday, 11 September 2002 09:03:01 UTC