LANG: need to CLOSE Issue 5.6 Imports as magic syntax

I believe we have reached strong consensus on the outline of a 
solution, but are still grappling with details.  Someone needs to 
take the action to resolve this.  Here is my understanding of an 
outline as to what we have consensus on:

i. When a document contains an explicit imports statement, the intent 
is that the triples in the imported document are treated basically as 
if they were in this document.  Thus, if one document states that 
Socrates is a man, and it imports a document which states that Men 
are mortal, then the consensus is that one should believe that 
Socrates is mortal.

ii. When a document does not contain an explicit imports statement, 
but does reference a second document, then we had consensus that it 
need not be determined (by us) whether all, some, or none of the 
triples from the second document should be treated as if they were in 
this document - the policy is left to the implementor (we might 
suggest a possible policy in one of our documents).  Thus, if one 
document states that Socrates is a man, and it refers to a document 
which states that Men are mortal, then the consensus is that it is a 
matter of policy left to implementors to  decide whether to believe 
that Socrates is mortal

iii. There is consensus that imports statements can include 
references to any document, not just ontologies (allowing the import 
of instances)

iv. There is consensus that imports statements are "extra logical" in 
the sense that it should be undefined as to the meaning of 
subclassing or etc. of imports. (i.e. details left undetermined by us)


Given the above, we need a means for describing this.  Jeff and Pat 
have produced emails about the issue of entailment across documents, 
but that seems to have gone unresolved.

We need to close this issue somehow - suggestions?
  -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 Tuesday, 29 October 2002 08:33:00 UTC