RE: A question on the vocabulary for 'persons' - ACL level of granularity?

> > I wish it could be that simple when you handle the task to 
> machine.  
> > Show me how you can only import the foaf:Person without 
> fetching the 
> > foaf:geekcodes as well? From other perspective, can you do 
> something 
> > like, I only use this part of GO but not the other part? 
> Even if you 
> > are allowed to do so, what do we mean sharing an ontology. 
> If someone 
> > agress only ome portion, but others agrees to other 
> portion, of the ontology?
> 
> You're right that there's no way to "dis-import" (i.e., refuse to
> import) parts of an ontology you disagree with.  But we have 
> to be careful to distinguish the parts you disagree with from 
> the parts you simply don't use.  In the case of "geekcodes," 
> I'm guessing that you don't have any opinions about them one 
> way or the other; you just think they're not relevant.  In 
> that case, it's harmless to import the ontology.  In 
> practice, this happens a lot.

Well, how can a computer knows my intension about the parts that I don't
"use/disagree"?  But, I think, if I disagree one portion of the ontology, I
certainly would not use the other part of the ontology at all since if I
make one contradicting statement, it will invalidate the entire model.

Hence, even if I don't disagree but just no use certain part of an ontology.
How do I know if those who want to use my ontology but disagree the imported
other part.  For example, if I develop a ex:Patient and make it a
rdfs:subClassOf the foaf:Person.  Personally, I don't care the
foaf:geekcodes.  But what if other, for example, Chris Mungall like my
ex:Patient but not the foaf:geekcodes, it will force him to not use
ex:Patient but develop another cm:Patient, where he might make a statement
saying that "there is no such thing as foaf:geekcodes".  Now the world
becomes messy because a simple mappying from ex:Patient to cm:Patient with
owl:equivalentClass won't be able to remove the contradiction.  Then, what
if someone disagree the online account part of foaf, or Organization, or
even Agent?  

> Another remark, which may be too obvious to be worth making, but here
> goes: You can use a namespace, and thus the symbols from an 
> ontology, without importing it.  In some cases, one does this 
> just to declare that you want to use that symbol to avoid 
> making up one of your own; and you don't need the axioms that 
> formally constrain the symbol's meaning.  In other cases, 
> there may be only a few such axioms, and you can simply copy 
> them.  I don't know if this is a good idea.  We're getting 
> into a whole mess of hard questions about version control, 
> partial importing of ontologies, etc. etc. that I wish I had 
> answers to.  

Do you mean just use the URI without importing it? If so, I am not sure how
it will work?  One of the neat features of the web is its loosely coupled
nature.  But you need to follow your nose to know more about the resource.
Without "importing", i.e., to fetch the resource description from the
namespace, what is the use of it?  For instance, if given a dubline core URI
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator, without following the URI, I won't
even know how I should label it.

Or, did I misunderstand your "using namespace without import"? If so, can
you give me an example?

Cheers,

Xiaoshu

Received on Sunday, 17 September 2006 03:24:24 UTC