- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.umd.edu>
- Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 09:34:37 -0400
- To: Ian Horrocks <horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
- Cc: "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfps@research.bell-labs.com>, jjc@hplb.hpl.hp.com
[[ This issue is moving here from webont WG as it has become a generic discussion of importing (yet again) rather than about a specific response. You are welcome to go to www-webont-wg@w3.org archives to see earlier messages in the thread, but I think you'll get the gist from the below ]] At 2:11 PM +0100 6/17/03, Ian Horrocks wrote: >On June 17, Jim Hendler writes: >> >> >> > >> >> In certain contexts, I think OWL would be useful with some ontologies >> >> preimported. >> > >> >Well, this would not be OWL. >> >> With due respect Peter, this must either be the dumbest thing I ever >> heard you say or, more likely, we're somehow not understanding each >> other. Most of our tools enable the user to start with ontologies > ===== > ===== > >What you describe here are OWL tools, not the OWL language. > >If I were Dan, what I would do is produce a <<tool>> that checked on >the usage of namespaces in an OWL ontology and automatically added >the import statements that I wanted. This would allow my applications >to work the way I wanted using reasoning that would still be sound >w.r.t. the OWL language spec. > >Regards, Ian that's how you would do it. My plan is to build tools that don't import whole documents when they see external pointers, they will only import some statements from those documents. However, the graphs they create will still be legal OWL (Full) graphs and usually will be legal OWL DL. What they won't necessarily be is documents that completely capture the intent of the ontology provider, and which may therefore not produce the same results as an imports would have stated. They may also lose "ground truth" in some deeper sense, but they certainly won't be incorrect OWL. (i.e. if I "invoke" a statement from your web page (ex:) that "Ian Horrocks" is an ex:male" but don't import the statement that "ex:male owl:DisjointClass ex:female", there is nothing wrong with my believing that you are ex:male - or even finding properties of that class and assuming you have them. There's certainly nothing wrong in my OWL - and my application could still produce very useful (and sound and complete) results - it's only if I brought in other statements that involved ex:female that a problem would occur, and I see no reason why tools couldn't handle that correctly (by importing only the parts of documents that are needed for particular applications). A real world example of this is that many people are using the portion of the CYC upper ontology for "time" without reading in the whole rest of CYC. This is why I care so much about this imports stuff. You may think the above is stupid or illogical, I think that anything else will cause the semantic web to fail. OWL is nice in that we both can have our mistaken beliefs and still build tools and ontologies that interoperate just fine. > > > > >> pre-imported -- for example we are building a cancer research project >> that starts from the NCI OWL Lite ontology. It comes preloaded. If, >> on the other hand, we started from having the user hit a button and >> import that ontology, it would not come preloaded. I cannot see how >> this would make any difference to whether something is OWL or not. >> >> My suspicion is there is some deeper issue which you are responding >> to. If we're just arguing about how the term "is OWL" is used, then >> it isn't worth much time, because the use of our vocabulary is out of >> our control once we publish it. >> >> -JH >> >> -- >> Professor James Hendler hendler@cs.umd.edu >> Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696 >> Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax) >> Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 *** 240-277-3388 (Cell) >> http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER *** -- Professor James Hendler hendler@cs.umd.edu Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies 301-405-2696 Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-6707 (Fax) Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 *** 240-277-3388 (Cell) http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER ***
Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 09:34:47 UTC