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

Massimo Marchiori wrote:

>
> > I remain entirely baffled by all of this.
...
> > Lots and lots of computer languages provide import-like things,
> > varying from C to Scheme, and from LaTeX to XML. None of these have any
of
> > the problems raised in the preceding discussion. Pat's example of
someone
> > changing an imported file is common to all of these, happily ignored by
all
> > of them, and rightly so, since it doesn't seem to break any of them, the
> > meaning and pragmatics of these import constructions is entirely clear
for
> > all of them. If it works for XML, why wouldn't it work for OWL?
> >
> > I can simply not imagine standing up in front of a crowd, proudly
explaining
> > OWL, and having to admit that,... eh... no, well... actually, in OWL you
> > cannot import other people's ontologies...
>
> Frank, I entirely agree. Note what you say is (I think) perfectly
compatible with
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Nov/0164.html , and
what others (including, implicitly, Jerome in his last
> post) have been advocating as well: the operational import.

I agree. Let's go back to the days when we all actually did programming.
"include" works, possibly has caused some problems at some point, but from
an operational point of view, works. What is the big deal here? this sort of
thing has been done for as long as there have been compilers and files on a
computer disk drive.

>...Users ...just need, pragmatically, something that lets them import
files.
>
> Besides, this would also avoid Jim a huge headache, and I think he will be
more than willing to offer us a round of beers to have
> this issue smoothly closed... And imagine at that point, the fun of
staying in front of a crowd and explaining that a round of beers
> helped to quickly produce this nifty OWL spec ;) !
>

Or whatever they serve in Amsterdam bars :-)

In any case if we do "import" from a really stupid, naive point of view it
will work at least as good as .h files, which means it will get the job
done. What is the danger here? ... don't include files twice yada yada.

I guess the 'problem' is that this really *is* a parse time (i.e. XInclude
like) issue and hence something that RDF Core ought have dealt with? Or a
base XML issue that we deal with using entities defined in the internal
subset - gasp!

Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2002 21:16:42 UTC