RE: Re[1] DAML-ONT: the case for closedness

Jerome.Euzenat
>
>The situation I had in mind at the beginning is not that simple. The point is
>in having three Ontologies:
>- myO, your ontology for whatever that you will build,
>- bigO, the well-known ontology that anybody uses in your field and 
>that you know you can trust very much.
>- theotherO, the ontology that is provided by the little startup you 
>don't know if you must trust but that provides you with the 
>lastthing widgets in ebusiness and that claim to be bigO compliant.
>	Well, you would like to be able to use these in such a way 
>that even if theotherO is flawed in some parts (that maybe you do 
>not use), this cannot affect the well-established concepts that you 
>know from bigO.
>	Unfortunately, due to the open character of the definitions, 
>someone can come and restrict a definition of a concept in bigO (and 
>this can be silent because it does not raise incoherence, just 
>restrict one or two extensions).

No, wait a minute. Only those with access to the bigO site can 
actually alter the information on that site (and even that wouldn't 
be playing by RDF rules). Someone else can publish a restriction on a 
different page: say, quantumO, which can make some claim (including a 
restriction) using the bigO vocabulary. That does not change the 
meaning of bigO#foo , however. If you want to refer to the restricted 
meaning, you would use quantumO#foo. To put the matter in a nutshell, 
no content can pass along a web reference in the direction of 
reference: it can only be used by the referring page to constrain the 
meanings of its own symbols.

>	So the point is: I trust bigO for sure. I am not really 
>confident about theotherO, but their new concepts are interesting 
>and they are bigO compliant (let say that I can still use the 
>concepts I know very well from bigO with their stuff).
>	Now, DAML does not provide any way for the bigO makers to 
>force some compliance.

Just as it provides no way to force someone to vote, or to hold a 
particular religion. Nothing but military actioncan *force* 
compliance, and maybe not even that. The best one can do would be to 
ensure that any false claim of compliance can be publicly checked for 
falsity, but has to be up to the actual user to do the checking.

Pat Hayes

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Received on Monday, 23 October 2000 17:03:58 UTC