Re: MT for imports

From: "Massimo Marchiori" <massimo@w3.org>
Subject: RE: MT for imports (was: Re: Imports Proposal)
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 02:14:15 +0100

> 
> > I remain entirely baffled by all of this.
> >
> > As Jerome Euzenat wrote:
> >
> > > The timed web structure applies to ontologies exactly like it applies to
> > > hyperlinks in html, xsl:include and xsl:imports in XSLT, etc.
> >
> > Of course, some advanced version of imports would depend on the "timed web
> > structure" (Massimo), but I cannot see how that should stop us from providing
> > something simple.

> > 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 am now totally confused.  Frank seems to be arguing that any reading of
owl:imports, declarative or opertational, does not suffer from timing
problems.  There is an implicit dependancy on the state of the file system,
i.e., the WWW, but so what?

> Specifically,
> rdfs:seeAlso is already there, and could profitably serve
> our needs. It's when these "pragmatic", as you say, needs are escalated to
> touch the logical structure (entailment), that we start
> to have problems; and we'd better postpone those problems to v2, as they
> would in all likelihood required a timed RDF datamodel, and
> even more cycles lost. Users don't need this for the moment, they just
> need, pragmatically, something that lets them import files.

Huh?  How is using owl:imports to add the meaning of another document to
the current one any different from using rdfs:seeAlso to ... add the
meaning of another document to the current one?

[...]

> -M

peter

Received on Thursday, 14 November 2002 08:47:34 UTC