Re: OWL import - different versions of same ontology

Melanie Courtot <mcourtot@gmail.com> writes:

> The OWL 2 spec at http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Imports reads "The
> import closure of an ontology O is a set containing O and all the
> ontologies that O imports. The import closure of O SHOULD NOT contain
> ontologies O1 and O2 such that
>
>  • O1 and O2 are different ontology versions from the same ontology series, or
>  • O1 contains an ontology annotation owl:incompatibleWith with the value equal to either the ontology IRI or the version IRI of O2."
>
>
> I don't have control over external resources such as IDO or OGMS; I
> could contact the developers of course, but I am looking for a long
> term general way of dealing with the issue. Nothing prevents
> developers of a given resource from importing a specific version of an
> ontology - this is indeed one of the advantage of having version IRIs.
> I don't think we can ask an OWL editor or the user to choose one
> version - there is no guarantee that the imported file works with the
> chosen version. 

I think that this is the solution at heart, I am afraid. The bottom line
is that the ontologies you are using are (indirectly) incompatible. So
you have to either choose one set of semantics or the other. Or you have
to fix the ontologies so that they are compatible. Or, finally, you have
to fudge things where different versions of a conceptualisation are just
considered to be independent things. 

As far as I can tell you should be in the latter situation (since the
dated versions should be in different namespaces) but protege thinks are
you are in the former situation, because it is recognising by the name
that the three ontology-metadata.owl's are all probably the same thing.
In practice, at least it is fail fast, rather than getting unexpected
inconsistencies which is what you would see otherwise. 

Phil

Received on Wednesday, 17 August 2011 10:04:45 UTC