Re: LANG: need to CLOSE Issue 5.6 Imports as magic syntax

At 11:06 AM -0500 11/10/02, Jonathan Borden wrote:
>Frank van Harmelen wrote:
>
>>
>>  QUESTION: without an explicit imports construct,
>>            how can I ever use the contents of someURI2,
>>            which contains the range definition of someURI1#Prop1 ?
>>
>>  I find this question so obvious that I fear it will have been answered
>>  before by the proponents of the "no import in OWL-v1", and I have
>>  probably just missed the answer to this. If so, please can someone point
>me
>>  to it?
>>
>>  This answer is so important to me because I could not live with OWL if the
>>  above scenario were not possible. Note: there is nothing fuzzy here
>>  concerning
>>  trust, commitment, asserting-or-not, etc. I just want to understand how I
>can
>>  specify to my reaoner from which premises it should draw its conclusions.
>>
>
>Good argument. This one seems to be compelling that we have an explicit
>imports.
>
>Aside from that, daml:imports *is* part of DAML+OIL and we really should
>make some attempt to stick to keeping such features of DAML+OIL in OWL
>unless there is some consensus *against*. Given that this is part of
>DAML+OIL, I find the arguments that owl:imports is somehow outside the scope
>of WebOnt WG less than compelling.
>
Jonathan


All, please be careful - no one has said that owl:imports is out of 
the scope of the WG.  Out of scope determinations are made by the 
chairs, and I know I think this is very much in our scope, and can't 
imagine Guus feels otherwise.
  Neither have I said we don't need to think about imports or that it 
isn't important.  Dan Connolly has suggested we POSTPONE the issue, 
making it clear that there are a lot of aspects of linking and 
importing yet to be explored and that maybe wedon't want to codify 
something we'll later regret.  I've come to reluctantly aree with him 
becuase I think imports is SO important that I'm made uncomfortable 
having our WG rule on it at this time - I'd prefer to leave it open 
for a later RDF/OWL combined "Architecture group" to get it right, 
and to have OWL and RDF(S) have a single unified approach to the 
inclusion of information not found on a particular document
  So no one has said imports is bad or shouldn't be there - the 
question we've been debating is whether people are currently 
comfortable enough to believe the solution on the table is one we 
won't come to regret at some later time.
  At this point I believe the issue has been clearly stated.  As I 
understand it, we are waiting for some specific wording to be 
suggested as to the closing of the issue, and how it will be adressed 
in our documents -- once that is there, we can have a formal vote on 
the issue, register objections, and move on.
  -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	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler

Received on Sunday, 10 November 2002 14:08:14 UTC