- From: Drew McDermott <drew.mcdermott@yale.edu>
- Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 17:32:30 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-rdf-logic@w3.org
[Didier Villevalois] > Shouldn't RDF support something like daml:imports in its core ?? > daml:imports would be a subPropertyOf 'rdf:imports'. > As rdf enables to speak about the same things in different places, it needs > a such mechanism. [Dan Brickley] One problem with pushing this down into RDF's core is that the meaning isn't clear, and (worse) that the clarification of the meaning isn't something we can easily do with any of the formalisms currently being used for RDF, DAML+OIL, WebOnt. ... I don't find much use for XML-level inclusion mechanisms in RDF content, I guess because the imperative sense of "hey, you must go grab that XML and include it here" seems at odds with the largely passive, descriptive, propositional nature of RDF/DAML+OIL content. Yes, I agree that sounds odd, but possibly for a different reason (see below). Another version at a different level of abstraction would be that the current document "in-some-sense-buys-into" the worldview, claims etc (including associated axioms etc) of the referenced document. This is hard to get right. Au contraire. It's extremely easy to get right. I don't see any particular reason why such mechanisms need to be defined solely for ontologies/schemas, either. No, but that's where we came in. It's currently defined for ontologies, and needs merely to be extended to datasets (sets of descriptions using one or more ontologies). This is an interesting problem though. But until we see a clear definition of 'imports' that tells me what I'm doing when I say my doc imports another, I'm not interested in deploying that property in my data. Too risky! It's risky only if you use it recklessly. For a nonreckless use, suppose I am interested in checking a dataset for *inconsistency.* (That's in fact the first thing we do with it.) For this application, getting as much information as possible from the component ontology is exactly right. I'd also want to be able to import a frozen representation of a namespace or ontology (eg. with sha1/md5 or XML signature). Sure, but that's an orthogonal issue. -- Drew McDermott
Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2002 17:32:35 UTC