RE: MT for imports (was: Re: Imports Proposal)

On Wed, 2002-11-13 at 11:16, Smith, Michael K wrote:
> > Yes, that's a pattern W3C uses to deal with trust issues
> > around our tech reports/specs; I can see it getting
> > used for ontologies too.
> 
> The problem is, without some way to point to the thing you
> want to use, you can't even do this.

But there is some way to point to the thing you
want to use; lots of ways, as I just explained
in my message of 13 Nov 2002 11:39:38 -0600
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Nov/0171.html

>  The user needs to be able
> to state an intention.

Users are able.

>  I prefer to have some minimal way
> to state that intention explicitly.  Without overloading
> the namespace declaration.

Yes, sometimes something other than namespace
declarations is useful; command-line options,
rdfs:seeAlso, and even daml:imports itself
(i.e. http://www.daml.org/2001/03/daml+oil#imports ,
not owl:imports).

> You are happy letting a thousand flowers bloom with a 
> variety of implementation dependent mechanisms. 

Yes, at this stage, I think that's best.

> I don't have experience with the previous attempts at this, 
> so possibly I am being naive, but I have not been convinced 
> of the difficulty of providing a very basic mechanism that 
> does not conflict with the 1000 flowers solution (you 
> can always leave out owl:imports).

The burden is not on me to convince you of the difficulty
of implementation.

(by the way... I agree that implementing this
is probably not that hard; we did an alpha implementation
of something similar in about 30 lines of N3 rules.
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/util/autoimport.n3
But that implementation
relies on log:semantics, which is part of the
'level-breaking' stuff in N3. I don't exactly
understand log:semantics formally, though I think
one of PatH's ideas, has promise
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Nov/0102.html

And I completely disagree that imports is separable
from trust issues.)

The burden is on this WG to convince the W3C community
of the maturity of the design; in order to include
daml:imports in a W3C REC, we need test cases
and implementations (and a formal spec, and guide
docs, etc.), not just thought experiments
and design sketches.

Yes, I can leave daml:imports out of my documents,
but I can't leave it out of our test suite, any
implementations that want to meet expectations
set by the spec, etc. if this WG decides to
standardize it now.

And putting a big blue ribbon on one of the flowers
definitely conflicts with the 1000 flowers solution.

As I mentioned in our recent telcon, the deployment
of the <font> tag in HTML led the community down
a destructive path that took 3 to 5 years to recover
from. CSS is now fairly widely deployed, but no
thanks to the proponents of the <font> tag.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2002 13:00:09 UTC