Re: Requirement Document

>The requirements document is still in progress, but if you want to look
>at an interim version, please point your browser to:
>
>http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/owl/
>
>During the telecon, we'll provide and update on the current status and
>request help in specific areas.

(As requested by Jim H in the telecon, some sentences regarding 
tagging/grouping/partitioning versus commitment. ) This was in 
response to Jim's remark that we need a way for one ontology to refer 
to a part of an ontology and commit to it. My point was that we 
should distinguish between the reference to a part of an ontology, 
and the commitment to the part so referenced, so that one can refer 
to a part of an ontology without automatically thereby assenting to 
it.

One reason for emphasizing this point is that there are several use 
cases already (notably Jos deRoos' implementation of N3) where the 
'grouping' technique is used to gather together a set of antecedents 
of an implication, so that one can say
[all this stuff] log:implies [this other stuff].

More generally, however, I would suggest that we take care to keep 
functionally distinct aspects of the language as distinct as 
possible, and that referring to/pointing to/whatever some ontology 
ought to one thing, and any speech act (assenting, asserting, 
denying, questioning, expressing doubt about, saying it is connected 
to foo, saying it entails foo....) involving it should be something 
else.

It would be OK to have a default case where if you just 'say' it 
without any further comment then that is taken to be an assertion 
(assention?), but it ought to be *very* easy to override that 
assumption. And I think it would be best to have an explicit 'we 
include this here' marker, like DAML's 'import'.

Pat Hayes
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Received on Thursday, 31 January 2002 12:58:42 UTC