LANG: Fwd: URI of "this" ontology

When comments arise on public-webont-comments that seem germane to 
discussions in our group, I will forward them to WOWG list -- in this 
case, the following is directly related to a discussion Raphael Volz 
brough up at our recent f2f - the issue of what URI to assign to an 
ontology -- the comment below is a possible solution that would work 
well within our "extra-logical features" approach and might also 
dovetail well with the versioning issue
  -JH



>Resent-Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 06:19:47 -0400 (EDT)
>Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2002 11:17:30 +0100
>From: David Allsopp <d.allsopp@signal.qinetiq.com>
>X-Accept-Language: en
>To: public-webont-comments@w3.org
>Subject: URI of "this" ontology
>
>
>Each OWL ontology has a URI, as used for the "import" feature. However,
>there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to record that URI _within the
>ontology document itself_. Of course, if the ontology is obtained over
>the web using the URI, there is no issue, but if the ontology is cached
>on disk, or obtained from a mirror, or otherwise used offline, it is not
>possible to determine from the ontology itself what its URI should be.
>This is already a problem with RDF - e.g. caching the RDF Schema itself
>often requires hacks such as replacing all relative URI references with
>absolute ones.
>
>Is there such a mechanism? If not, can I suggest that in the Header
>information, a field similar to "imports" be included to provide this
>URI? Perhaps "uri" or "baseUri" would be appropriate.
>
>Applications could use this URI to correctly parse cached ontologies. If
>the ontology is obtained directly using its URI, the internal URI could
>be either ignored or used as a check to ensure the correct document was
>obtained.
>
>E.g.
>
><Ontology rdf:about="">
>     <versionInfo>$Id: Overview.html,v 1.4 2002/07/31 19:44:09 henri Exp
>$</versionInfo>
>     <rdfs:comment>An example ontology</rdfs:comment>
>     <uri rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl/example.owl"/>
>     <imports rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl"/>
></Ontology>
>
>Regards,
>
>David Allsopp
>
>--
>/d{def}def/u{dup}d[0 -185 u 0 300 u]concat/q 5e-3 d/m{mul}d/z{A u m B u
>m}d/r{rlineto}d/X -2 q 1{d/Y -2 q 2{d/A 0 d/B 0 d 64 -1 1{/f exch d/B
>A/A z sub X add d B 2 m m Y add d z add 4 gt{exit}if/f 64 d}for f 64 div
>setgray X Y moveto 0 q neg u 0 0 q u 0 r r r r fill/Y}for/X}for showpage


-- 
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	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Friday, 2 August 2002 08:48:57 UTC