Re: ISSUE 5.14 - Ontology versioning

Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
> Jeff Heflin wrote:
> >
> > Prior versions:
> > ----------------
> > <url> priorVersion <url>.
> >
> > The second URL is an earlier version of the first. This has no meaning
> > in the semantics, but could be used by software to organize ontologies
> > by versions. Due to XML namespaces the identifiers in the two ontologies
> > will be treated as distinct unless there are explicit statements of
> > equivalence.  Thus, the two ontologies can be merged without problems,
> > although there will be no "integration" unless specific mappings are
> > defined.
> 
> I'm not groking the "Due to XML namespaces ..." part. Wouldn't any two
> distinct URIrefs be treated as distinct unless there were statements of
> equivalence? i.e. how do XML namespaces affect this?
> 
> Jonathan

Perhaps I didn't word that well. What I meant was that in RDF, different
IDs in different documents are assumed to be in different namespaces.
That is, if one ontology said:

<Class ID="Car">

and another ontology said:

<Class ID="Car">

then the default in RDF is to assume that these are two different
classes. I view this as something RDF inherited from XML namespaces, but
maybe that's not correct.

Jeff

Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2002 16:53:08 UTC