- From: Yves Raimond <yves.raimond@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:45:16 +0100
- To: martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org
- Cc: Michael Hausenblas <michael.hausenblas@deri.org>, hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, "Hepp, Martin" <mhepp@computer.org>, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com, "Booth, David (HP Software - Boston)" <dbooth@hp.com>, "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>
Hello! > > (moving this to LOD public as suggested) > > General note: I am quite unhappy with a general movement in parts of the LOD > community to clash with the OWL world even when that is absolutely > unnecessary. It is just a bad engineering practice to break with existing > standards unless you can justify the side-effects. And this stubborn "i > don't care what the OWL specs says" pattern is silly, in particular if the > real motivation of many proponents of this approach is that they don't want > or cannot read the OWL specs. > > As for owl:imports: > > When importing an ontology by owl:imports, you commit to the whole formal > account of that ontology. If you just include an element from that ontology > by using it and hope that dereferencing will get the relevant formal account > in your model, you expose your model to randomness - you don't know what > subset of the formal account you will get served. Ontology modularization is > a pretty difficult task, and people use various heuristics for deciding what > to put in the subset being served for an element. There is no guarantee that > the fragment you get contains everything that you need. > Sorry, just jumping on that, as this is something I am having quite a lot of troubles to understand (and since quite a long time). Maybe I am missing something obvious, but how does using owl:imports avoid this randomness? When using it, you're still hoping that dereferencing the object of owl:imports will get you the relevant information? I agree that owl:imports allows you to commit to a whole ontology instead of committing to single terms within an ontology, but I would argue that in most cases, you just want to pick a few terms in an ontology. For example, I may agree with the way OWL-Time models time-zones etc., but I don't agree with the way it models time intervals vs. events. Also, I don't agree that questioning owl:imports is equivalent to dismissing OWL all-together. I think most of the people on this list are OWL-heads (having contributed or created quite a lot of ontologies, some of them even being OWL-DL! :-) ), and I don't remember seeing an anti-OWL statement on this list? Cheers! y
Received on Monday, 22 June 2009 19:45:54 UTC