SKOS Concept schemes and OWL Ontologies

Hi all,

I am after some clarity on using owl:imports with respect to concept 
schemes, hopefully my problem is clear from the examples. I should point 
out that I create my SKOS vocabularies as OWL ontologies using Protege.

So consider an OWL ontology called ONT1, it contains the following  
instances.

ex1:csA rdf:type skos:ConceptScheme

ex1:csB rdf:type skos:ConceptScheme

I also have an Ontology called ONT2 that conatins:

ex2:csC rdf:type skos:ConceptScheme

ex2:csC owl:imports ex1:csA

What should I expect to get imported into ONT2. I get two different  
results depending on how I interpret skos:ConceptSchema (i.e as a  
owl:Class or an owl:Ontology - If I am correct it is consistent in  
SKOS to do both)

1) ONT2 imports only the concepts that are in concept scheme csA?  
(which is what I want to happen)

2) ONT2 imports all of ONT1? (which is how it could be interpreted  
because of the semantics of owl:imports)

If owl:imports is to be used with concept schemes then why not always  
treat concept schemes to be the same as owl:Ontologies?  Was the  
possibility of a skos:imports ever discussed by the working group?

Cheers,
Simon

Simon Jupp
simon.j...@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~sjupp/

Received on Thursday, 6 March 2008 01:36:07 UTC