Re: URI of "this" ontology

At 11:17 AM +0100 8/2/02, David Allsopp wrote:
>Each OWL ontology has a URI, as used for the "import" feature. However,
>there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to record that URI _within the
>ontology document itself_. Of course, if the ontology is obtained over
>the web using the URI, there is no issue, but if the ontology is cached
>on disk, or obtained from a mirror, or otherwise used offline, it is not
>possible to determine from the ontology itself what its URI should be.
>This is already a problem with RDF - e.g. caching the RDF Schema itself
>often requires hacks such as replacing all relative URI references with
>absolute ones.
>
>Is there such a mechanism? If not, can I suggest that in the Header
>information, a field similar to "imports" be included to provide this
>URI? Perhaps "uri" or "baseUri" would be appropriate.
>
>Applications could use this URI to correctly parse cached ontologies. If
>the ontology is obtained directly using its URI, the internal URI could
>be either ignored or used as a check to ensure the correct document was
>obtained.
>
>E.g.
>
><Ontology rdf:about="">
>     <versionInfo>$Id: Overview.html,v 1.4 2002/07/31 19:44:09 henri Exp
>$</versionInfo>
>     <rdfs:comment>An example ontology</rdfs:comment>
>     <uri rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl/example.owl"/>
>     <imports rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl"/>
></Ontology>
>
>Regards,
>
>David Allsopp

David - thanks much for this suggestion.  We had some discussion of 
this at our recent face to face, but had not worked out a solution - 
the idea of using a baseuri in the ontology definition is a very good 
one - I will forward it to the working group to be included in the 
discussion of this issue
  -Jim H
  WG CoChair


-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Friday, 2 August 2002 08:45:39 UTC