Re: ISSUE-24, ISSUE-21: Versioning language

From: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: ISSUE-24, ISSUE-21: Versioning language
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:08:14 -0400

> 
> On Jun 18, 2008, at 3:30 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >>> But then what syntactic category are the subject and object of triples
> >>> with property owl:incompatibleWith?
> >>
> >> What is the syntactic category of a versionURI?
> >
> > In the OWL 2 syntax a version URI only shows up in a special place in
> > the syntax, and is thus has the syntactic category of the version URI of
> > the ontology.
> 
> As I propose that these don't have logical semantics, perhaps the
> syntactic category "things that are the subject or object of
> owl:incompatibleWith". Allow them to be any URI, and only pay
> attention to them if it happens that both of them are ou or vu of an
> ontology in the imports closure. If that doesn't work, could you
> explain how it would cause probems? 

Well, for starters, there would have to be new syntax for this in the
functional syntax.  I wouldn't want to delay finishing imports waiting
for an analysis of all the changes required to add a new kind of thing
to OWL.

> >> I found I had to navigate to a number of places to collect the
> >> information I needed to understand what the policy is. In my
> >> previous mail I suggested it say something direct, like:
> >>
> >> 1) Import(u) means access the ontology at u.
> >> 2) If the accessed ontology has an ou, optional vu that one of them
> >> should be u. 
> >
> > Sure, but what does this have to do with current versions, particularly
> > with a "must" wording?
> 
> In my reading I couldn't figure where it said that it wasn't cool for
> a tool to access the current version of an ontology instead of the
> specified version. I could have tried to rewrite the whole section
> to be simpler and more direct. Instead I chose to patch the place I
> though there was hole with some language that said you can't do
> that. 

Well, why should the document say that if you want to access the current
version of an ontology then you must not use the version URI?  Isn't it
like saying that if you want an intersection then you must not use a
union?

> > I agree that importing incompatible ontologies or importing multiple
> > versions of an ontology should be handled the same way.  I was wondering
> > why this had to be "syntactic invalidity", which I think needlessly
> > conflates ontology incompatibility with syntactic validity.
> 
> OK, then we are in agreement about what I considered the root
> problem. Let's discuss alternatives to invoking syntactic
> validity. At the low end we have the old "should not be in the
> imports closure" wording. I we all can't agree to something that
> improves on that it's fine with me to leave it like that. 

OK

peter

Received on Thursday, 19 June 2008 01:12:25 UTC