- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:43:12 +0000
- To: Timothy Redmond <tredmond@stanford.edu>
- Cc: Ian Horrocks <ian.horrocks@comlab.ox.ac.uk>, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, public-owl-wg@w3.org
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