Re: importing and entialment

Jeff Heflin wrote:
>
> ... However, I think that it
> is still desirable to say that if the import "fails," any inferences are
> inherently incomplete. Whether it was because the author mistyped the
> URL or because the document being referenced was moved by its owner,
> there is something that the author of the importing document wants
> referenced, but the deductive system is unable to take it into
> consideration. I believe saying the inferences are incomplete is much
> more graceful than having a defined error condition in such cases
> (although specific systems are free to raise warnings or errors in such
> cases). However, I believe an error condition is still better than just
> saying "well let's assume the imports statement refers to an empty
> document."
>

The reason monotonicity is emphasized for Web applications is that we need
to make such assumptions.

Perhaps when an import is successful, we ought add a triple to the KB that
says

<http://example.org/ex.owl> owl:importStatus true .

or something to that effect?

I _wouldn't_ flag failures, as they might succeed at a later time (and so
the absense of success is a better flag than explicit failure).

Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 23 October 2002 07:44:25 UTC