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

On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 19:34, Jim Hendler wrote:
> 
> [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),

but it has to be
  -- implemented
not to mention
  -- tested
  -- specified
  -- explained
etc.

> 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?

Because specification of it involves connecting logic
with protocols in an unprecedented way.

---
excerpt from
> [1] http://ilrt.org/discovery/chatlogs/rdfig/2002-10-30.html

 22:31:33   <timbl> I am saying that the functionality is useful but
here are many ways of doing it and you need a new model theory for the
web. I can write axioms for daml:imports using my log:semantics and
log:includes. But i think the community would wantto discuss al this. So
it shouldn't be core webont.
---

And because I see so many places where the requirement
is met without using daml:imports.

And because, well, just because. i.e. because my
engineering experience tells me so. I don't expect this
latter reason to convince anybody else, but you asked
me for my position.

>  Would 
> it help if we made sure that documents (all or some) made it very 
> clear that this use of imports was optional?

No.

That wouldn't reduce the burden to specify/test/explain/etc.

And most importantly: it won't make it any easier to
remove it later if/when we find a better solution.


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

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2002 23:32:12 UTC