Re: rdf inclusions (was Re: DAML Level of Effort for FY03-FY05)

Drew McDermott writes:
> Anyway, the following strikes me as the only reasonable point of view:
> There is simply no way to import part of an ontology, as Sandro and
> Frank both seem to want to do. 

I'm not sure how I was misunderstood.  I think the only reasonable
thing to import is another RDF graph (serialized as some
web-accessible document and named by the web address).

By way of analogies, I think this kind of importing is much more like
object-code linking than source-code inclusion.   But in either
case, yes, taking only part of a document is problematic.

So are you committing to some particular web content being served at
the namespace address?  That's a difficult issue to get consensus on.
People want to be able to use XML instance data with schemas not on
the web and not necessarily shared.  That seems to me like a bad idea
with ontologies, but it's a big problem any XML-namespaces proposal
will run into.

[example of typical RDF using stuff without importing it]
> But how can a computer see all this?  Should it just assume that any
> namespace that expands out to something ending in ".daml" somehow is
> an ontology?  This strikes me as a silly tactic for avoiding an
> "imports" declaration.

Is it important to you to keep the instance data and the ontology in
separate graphs?  I think the Semantic Web is based on merging all the
graphs one believes and can access, so the instances and their
ontologies should not be considered separable graphs.

    -- sandro

Received on Sunday, 21 April 2002 22:43:12 UTC