question about imports

As I understand things, the current meaning of imports is that including

owl:imports B

in a document A has exactly the same meaning as copying the imports 
closure of B into A.

So I have a question: consider two documents A and AC which are 
identical except that A contains owl:imports B, and AC actually has 
the imports closure of B copied into it at that point, but has no 
reference whatever to B. These two documents have exactly the same 
meaning, right? And the first, but not the second, refers to another 
document.

The point of this is that one intuitive argument that has been given 
for the use of owl:imports is that the cross-references between 
ontologies might support a kind of semantic Google process whereby 
the most-imported ontologies are rated as more trustworthy, or 
something like that. But since the current semantics doesn't require 
the links to exist, that seems to mean that it fails to capture 
something of potential importance. Roughly, the thing that is missing 
is a relationship between documents (or document tokens, or 
ontologies, maybe) which is that one of them agrees with, or 
endorses, the other.

Comments? (In case you are suspicious, I'm honestly not trying to 
de-rail owl:imports, just to clarify the intention of how it is going 
to be used. If we want to keep the 'endorsement' sense, I think we 
can tweak the wording of our definition to retain it.)

Pat
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC					(850)434 8903   home
40 South Alcaniz St.			(850)202 4416   office
Pensacola               			(850)202 4440   fax
FL 32501            				(850)291 0667    cell
phayes@ai.uwf.edu	          http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
s.pam@ai.uwf.edu   for spam

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2002 13:27:48 UTC