Re: ACTION-264: Discuss imports with Tim Redmond.

On 17 Feb 2009, at 19:06, Timothy Redmond wrote:

>>>  It might be great for a particular tool but it seems like it   
>>> will depend on many assumptions that get in  the way of sharing  
>>> ontologies.
>> [snip]
>>
>> How so? XML Catalogs can be shared.
>
> I now think I was wrong about this.  If it is ok, I will give some  
> use cases and you can let me know what you think.

Sure.

> I have a collection of ontologies in svn.  Different members of the  
> team with different tool sets check these ontologies out onto their  
> hard drives.  They are all going to use different tools to access  
> the ontologies so it is important to represent important  
> information in a way that can be recognized by all the tools involved.

Yes.

> In order to resolve the import statements we use an XML Catalog.   
> This XML Catalog will have entries such as the following:
>     <uri name="http://purl.org/obo/owl/PATO" uri="file:obofoundry/ 
> quality.owl"/>
> The "file:obofoundry/quality.owl" has to be relative because  
> anything else would encode assumptions about a particular users  
> environment.  But an obvious rule would be to interpret relative  
> URI's as relative to the location of the XML Catalog.

That's what the spec says:
	http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html#s.uri

It uses xml base:
	http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/#resolution

> You also mentioned an XML Catalog in a zip file - I like this  
> case.  The following doesn't work
>     <uri name="http://purl.org/obo/owl/PATO"  
> uri="zip:file:ontologies.zip!obofoundry/quality.owl"/>

? I meant that you could zip up the ontologies with the catalog,  
which I thought was your use case. There is no zip uri scheme (nor  
should there be!) But if your system can autounpack zips, you could  
have something that was zipped, I gues.

> It is broken if the name of the zip file is changed.  But in the  
> spirit of the relative URI above perhaps the following works fine
>     <uri name="http://purl.org/obo/owl/PATO" uri="obofoundry/ 
> quality.owl"/>.

Definitely what I woul do.

> If XML Catalogs are adopted by ontology tools, then we could  
> imagine that these tools would also include a capability to  
> automatically generate XML Catalogs in various situations.

Yes, exactly.

>   For example, when gathering the imports closure from the web onto  
> a directory, an ontology tool can keep track of
> 1. the ontology name/ontology version found by a given imports  
> directive
> 2. the location on disk where the ontology with a given name and  
> version is placed.
> Once the downloads are complete, the tool can combine the  
> information from 1 & 2 above to create an XML Catalog.  By keeping  
> track of items 1 and 2 separately, the tool can avoid downloading  
> two separate files on disk with the same ontology name and  
> version.  Specifically the two imports
> 	imports http://purl.org/obo/owl/quality
> and
> 	imports http://purl.org/obo/owl/PATO
> will generate a single owl file on disk.
>
> Another upcoming use case for XML Catalogs might be ontology  
> repositories.
[snip]

Yep.

Does this meet your concern?

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2009 19:39:44 UTC