- From: Matthew Pocock <matthew.pocock@ncl.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:32:31 +0000
- To: public-owl-dev@w3.org
Hi, We've started moving quite sizeable amounts of OWL 1.1 xml about via web services. We're currently doing this by pushing an OWL:Ontology element inside the SOAP body. We are having problems with the 'semantics' of the ontology element itself, and by extension, how the tools we are using handle ontologies as data-structures. Through having logical and physical URIs, the ontology elements are making some sort of statement that they are a recognisable set of axioms, that exist for some purpose, and so on. The axioms we are moving about are either sub-sets of the axioms within an ontology with a known logical URI, or are a sub-set of the entailment of the axioms within an ontology with a known logical URI. They are not in themsevles a cohesive whole of axioms, but rather more like incremental updates, deltas. In particular, it makes no sense at all to give them a physical URI. The role fulfilled by the logical URI for 'real' ontologies is also somewhat moot in this context - what defines the bag of axioms in our case is the original ontology, and the assertion that these are a (possibly arbitrary) sub-set of the entailment of that ontology, possibly with extra information defining bounds on what made it into the sub-set. Our system allows a certain amount of slop in what gets passed over the wire, within defined bounaries, so two identical requests against an identical service may legitimately return different sets of axioms, without the requester becomming confused or behaving differently. Hence, the only thing that uniquely identifies the set of axioms is the set of axioms itself. So, the things we are moving about: a) have no physical location, ever (they are generated by software, streamed, consumed by software) b) have no logical URI that identifies them, or any other identifier smaller than themselves c) are a sub-set of the axioms entailed by some other ontology, which does have a logical URI Is there some other top-level element other than Ontology that better fulfills these needs? If not, is there some standard way to indicate to tools that the ontology has no physical or logical URI, but is a) a sub-set of the axioms in another ontology or b) the axioms entailed by another ontology or c) a sub-set of the axioms entailed by another ontology? Thanks, Matthew
Received on Wednesday, 31 October 2007 12:32:50 UTC