Re: ISSUE 5.6 - daml:imports as magic syntax

See my earlier reply to Peter [1] about why I don't like a purely
syntactic approach.

I also had one additional thought since sending that message. A pure
syntactic inclusion could result in multiple ontologies in a single
document with no way to distinguish between what contents are in each
(since the owl:Ontology tags don't actually wrap the class and property
descriptions, but instead only wrap the metadata about the ontology).
Furthermore, the standard use is something like:

<owl:Ontology rdf:about="">
...
</owl:Ontology>

This use of relative URLs would change the meaning of the syntax when it
is placed in a different document.

Jeff

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0112.html

Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
> Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
> >
> > A treatment of imports can be done completely syntactically, by replacing
> > imports foo, where foo is a URI (or whatever) by the contents of the
> > document pointed at by foo.   This is the way I would handle it in the
> > abstract syntax and direct semantics.
> 
> hmmm... if we consider that daml:imports is syntactic sugar for XInclude
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/ i.e.
> 
> <xi:include
>     xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
>     href="foo.daml"
> />
> 
> just using XInclude as it is already specified would allow us to prune this
> whole discussion and the issues it raises of special syntax, semantics etc.
> 
> Jonathan

Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2002 17:00:16 UTC