RE: LANG: need to CLOSE Issue 5.6 Imports as magic syntax

On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 16:07, Smith, Michael K wrote:
> 
> 2 more cents.
> 
> > 3) The imports triples are considered extra-logical, and any statements
> > that contain owl:imports as a subject or object are undefined.
> > Furthermore, any imports statements that have a resource other than the
> > containing document as a subject are undefined.
> 
> OK.  
> 
> > 2) The semantics essentially be "A imports B means if B entails P then A
> > entails P." ...
> 
> Imports is extra-logical by 3.  It has no formal semantics.  
> 
> I know what you are trying to get at, I just don't think we have
> figured out how to say it.

I find some of the recent design discussion interesting, and
I'm still mulling over the 9Oct suggestion from Hayes...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Oct/0057.html

but I just ran this by my colleagues again, and my position
is still that we should POSTPONE this issue; take
it out of owl until the next version.

Imports is really quite different from the rest of the
terms in our spec. The other terms, like FunctionalProperty
and such, refer to pretty crisp mathematical notions
that can be translated to first order logic (or
axiomatized or whatever). Even with the 9Oct suggestion
from Hayes to give a formal specification for imports
involves a pretty substantial change to the interpretation
structure.

Peter noted the connection to the RDF concepts material
on "social meaning" of RDF documents; I'm more optimistic
about that material than he is, but I agree that it's pretty immature.
I'd like to get a lot more implementation experience in
this design space before I commit to Recommendation level
support for it.

I hope folks will consider whether they could live
without a standardized design for this feature for
a year or so.


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

Received on Tuesday, 29 October 2002 17:30:34 UTC