Re: LANG: Proposal to close ontology versioning (ISSUE 5.14)

Jeff writes in response to Massimo:
><snip>
>  > > > Finally, there could be some thought on the core set of 
>primitives we need for this.
>>  > > For example, do we need primitives to
>>  > > a) signal INcompatibility?
>>  >
>>  > My opinion is that if backward-compatibility is not declared, then
>>  > incompatibility should be assumed.
>>  Errr... why? Ontologies should be allowed to merge, so forcing 
>>incompatibility by default doesn't seem like a very good idea 
>>(what's
>>  why I had raised the option to signal incompatibility).
>
>Backward-compatibility is only a relation that can hold between two
>versions of the same ontology. I should have been clearer and said that
>if one ontology is a priorVersion of another and backward-compatibility
>is not declared, then incompatibility should be assumed. The ontology
>author is the one who knows best whether the two versions are
>incompatible, so I don't see how merging has anything to do with it.
><snip>

Jeff -
  while I support your current proposal, I have a lot of trouble with 
"If ... backward-compatibility is not declared, then incompatibility 
should be assumed"
I think that is way to strong -- I think it should be something more like

If ... backward-compatibility is not declared, then compatibility 
should not be assumed"

that is, if you have a new version and don't make any declarations at 
all, why should I assume that everything must be broken.  Rather I 
should have a caveat that it may be broken and proceed with caution. 
I think this is most important for those of us who don't intend to 
use the strong imports unless we have to, and thus if we are pointing 
to a small piece of ontology with our own policy on how to process 
it, it should be up to me to decide about compatibility.  I could 
also live with
If ... backward-compatibility is not declared, then incompatibility 
MAY be assumed"

-- 
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 Tuesday, 3 December 2002 10:54:17 UTC