- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2002 10:34:54 -0500
- To: Peter Crowther <peter.crowther@networkinference.com>
- cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> > From: Sandro Hawke [mailto:sandro@w3.org] > > I was thinking there would be no ordering -- if a definition > > was found in more than one ontology, an error would be > > reported. If ontologies were well-behaved in never losing > > terms, this means at worst one's code > > would produce an error instead of the wrong results. Is that still > > too dangerous to provide to users? > > Another problem is ontologies *gaining* terms - you might suddenly find that > a previously well-behaved system fails simply because someone has introduced > a term to an ontology that has an identical name to one you're already using > (with its default name) in another ontology. This *will* happen on the > Semantic Web, because people won't be as careful as we would wish about > versioning and never replacing the contents of a particular URL. I wasn't very clear. Yes, I was assuming "well-behaved" ontologies would only gain terms, not lose any. And I went on to say that this kind of change would produce a different (much less dangerous) kind of error, and therefor might be acceptable. But now that I think about it, I'm really not sure what changes to an ontology are legitimate. There are really two kinds of changes: adding constraints and removing them. Is one of these somehow better for users? There's a lot to be said for forbidding changes at all, importing a particular version. -- sandro
Received on Friday, 8 March 2002 10:35:26 UTC