[Fwd: Re: Proposed response to Golbeck regarding imports issue]

Dan,

In my proposed text regarding imports in Reference:

> > > "Note that although owl:imports and namespace declarations may appear
> > > redundant, they actually serve very different purposes. Namespace
> > > declarations simply set up a shorthand for referring to identifiers.
> > > They do not implicitly include the meaning of documents located at the
> > > URI (although some applications may choose to process these documents in
> > > addition to the original document). On the other hand, owl:imports does
> > > not provide any shorthand notation for referring to the identifiers from
> > > the imported document. Therefore, it is common to have a corresponding
> > > namespace declaration for any ontology that is imported."
> > 

Peter has asked that I remove the comment about some applications
choosing to process the URIs associated with namespaces:

> > I oppose including the parenthetical remark above.  I believe that such
> > permissive statements have no place in our documents.
> > 

Would you oppose the removal of this parenthetical remark? I expect that
it is more important to you than anyone else in the WG. So if you can
live with its removal, then in order to conserve WG effort, that's what
I will do.

If on the other hand, we have two WG members who disagree, I ask that
the chairs rule that this be a matter of editor's discretion. I do not
believe the remark is in conflict with our resolution of imports, but I
also do not believe it is required in the text. Editor's discretion of
course would mean that Guus gets to decide, but if he'd rather defer
that to me as the handler of the imports comment, then I'd be willing.

Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that Reference is not a normative
document, so the impact of whatever we decide will be minor. Let's not
waste too much WG time on this!

Jeff

Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 11:35:20 UTC