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

[various stuff snipped]

I've been avidly following this discussion, and also carefully read 
the dialog between Jeff and Tim Berners-Lee publicly logged at [1]. 
I find myself torn - on the one hand, I'm certainly familiar with 
Jeff's work in SHOE and the use of something like "imports" to mean 
"Commits to" -- i.e. that I agree with EVERYTHING that some ontology 
(or set of instances or whatever) says, whether I link to it directly 
or not. On the other hand, I'm beginning to better understand what 
Dan (and Tim) are saying about maybe we want to allow more freedom to 
explore different commitment methods and the like.

I would ask the following - if imports is an optional feature (we've 
already agreed it doesn't have to be used), and since anyone can 
invent their own term to explore a different commitment strategy what 
is the downside of including an imports statement of the type Jeff 
advocates?)

For example, I am playing with something that looks a bit like this:

  <> jim:commits
    [jim:partialMappingTo foo: ;
     jim:usingMappingRules bar: ] .

in some recent research, and don't see where the existence of 
imports, which I won't use here, bothers me.  I couldn't live with 
the meaning that referring to something in another ontology 
automatically had the strong implication that imports does (total 
agreement), but I have no real problem with one I don't have to use, 
but can if I want that particular meaning.

So Dan, I guess this is to you -- why do you think including one 
particular imports method would be premature standardization?  Would 
it help if we made sure that documents (all or some) made it very 
clear that this use of imports was optional?
  -JH

p.s. This is not meant to be rhetorical, I'm really trying to 
understand both sides.




[1] http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2002-10-30.html
-- 
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 Wednesday, 30 October 2002 20:34:38 UTC