- From: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:04:25 -0800
- To: W3C OWL Working Group <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
- Cc: Timothy Redmond <tredmond@stanford.edu>
I had a talk with Tim on tuesday. He is concerned with the following situation - a zip file of ontologies is sent, perhaps a development version of a modular ontology. Someone wants Protege to open and edit this ontology. He needs to examine the folder and figure out how to resolve the various imports. For the purposes of this discussion we can assume that all ontologies in the closure are in the folder. How can he do this? He points out that the language we use is If O contains an ontology IRI OI but no version IRI, then the ontology document of O should be accessible from the IRI OI. He points out that this is different from saying ... should be accessed from ... or ... and is the one that would be accessed. This could be fixed, in his opinion, by amending the description of canonical parsing. Current: CP-2.1 Retrieve the ontology document DI from I as specified in Section 3.2. Since 3.2 only specifies where one might retrieve the document from (where it is accessible), tightening this to: CP-2.1 Retrieve the ontology document DI from from a location that I 3.2 says it is accessible from. We also discussed that having a portable way of specifying the a redirection mapping might better deal with this rather common case. ----- Our discussion pointed to two more issues to note: 1) The current behavior of Protege 4 is that when loading an ontology from a file system, it always looks in the same directory for ontologies that are imported? Should this be the default behavior? I would argue not. Tools may implement a redirection mechanism, and protege 4 supplies one in the form of an ontology library mechanism where a set of directories to search is specified. Therefore absent an explicit mention of the "." directory in the ontology libraries the ontology should be accessed from IRI specified in the imports or versionuri statement. In any case it would be nice if our document could say enough that the appropriate behavior could be determined. 2) He notes a case in the aforementioned zip file use case that can not be resolved at all: Two ontologies in the zip file ("headers" below) ontology foo versionuri bar ontology foo versionuri bar1 The document that is loaded has the following: import foo There is no way to determine which of the two documents on disk is to be preferred over the other. I don't see any way of repairing this, however it does suggest that enumerating a couple of examples might be a useful addition to our documentation.
Received on Thursday, 12 February 2009 16:05:04 UTC