- From: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 19:45:30 -0400 (EDT)
- To: connolly@w3.org
- CC: drew.mcdermott@yale.edu, www-archive@w3.org, danbri@w3.org
I'm not sure what log:semantics is either, formally; but re cyc-style lifting, see Contexts: A Formalization and Some Applications http://www-formal.stanford.edu/guha/guha-thesis.ps I really must get around to reading this. > But, as I said on www-rdf-logic, importing an ontology just means > incorporating its contents. What's hard about that? ont:imports isn't just magic syntax. It's a property that relates ontology documents. It can be specialized using subProperty. ... So Lassie is an animal; but you have to do reasoning to figure out what to import from OntX. Well, our disagreement is clear, but, at least in part, easily settled. In our view, 'imports' *is* magic syntax, and not a property of anything. If the name is taken already, and is widely agreed to be a "metaproperty" of ontologies, then we will pick a different name for the operation of "including an ontology in a dataset." The remaining disagreement appears to concern the meaning of daml:imports when it occurs in an ontology. The designers of the language, by writing it as <> daml:imports "http:// whatever " have indeed made daml:imports an ordinary property that could indeed have subproperties, etc. I propose that we undo or bypass this decision and introduce magic syntax for the straightforward concept of just importing another ontology. Here's an argument that I think should convince you: Suppose I have <> my:imports1 <OntU> <> my:imports2 <OntV> It happens that OntU declares my:imports2 daml:subPropertyOf daml:imports whereas OntV declares my:imports1 daml:subPropertyOf daml:imports Does anyone import anything? Even in less pathological examples, you have to untangle a bunch of labeled, unordered edges in a graph. Some of these edges, according to your view, allow me to import ontologies which would then, and only then, allow me to view some of the other edges as importing yet other ontologies. Couldn't the meaning depend on the order in which I made these importations? Why insist on this mess when there is a useful and comprehensible piece of magic syntax that we so obviously need? -- Drew
Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 19:45:34 UTC