RE: LANG: syntactic version for imports (and other things)

Here is a suggestion, based on Peter's syntax, for the syntactic
macro expansion of owl:imports using XML:Base.

Given

<rdf:rdf 
    xmlns     ="#" ...
    owl:imports="uri1;...;uriN">
 <owl:ontology about=""> ... </owl:ontology>
</rdf:rdf>

Collect the transitive closure, (uri1...uriM), of the imports clauses.

Then return the original rdf:rdf tree with

1. the owl:imports attribute deleted and, 
2. for all uri in (uri1...uriM), 
   the correspondig owl:ontology component, augmented with 
   an XML:Base adjustment (must be first attribute) and
   any namespace declarations on its parent rdf:rdf tag.

E.g.

<rdf:rdf 
    xmlns     ="#" ... >
 <owl:ontology about=""> ... </owl:ontology>
 <owl:ontology xml:Base="uri1"
               xmlns:ns11="uri11" ...
               xmlns:ns1i="uri1i" 
               about=""> 
  ... 
 </owl:ontology>
 ...
 <owl:ontology xml:Base="uriM"
               xmlns:nsM1="uriM1" ...
               xmlns:nsMj="uriMj" 
               about=""> 
  ... 
 </owl:ontology>

</rdf:rdf>

Null ontologies (for whatever reason) are ignored.

- Mike

Michael K. Smith, Ph.D., P.E.
EDS - Austin Innovation Centre
98 San Jacinto, #500
Austin, TX  78701

* phone: +01-512-404-6683
* mailto:michael.smith@eds.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider [mailto:pfps@research.bell-labs.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 12:24 PM
To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
Subject: LANG: syntactic version for imports (and other things)



My suggestion would be that imports is an XML attribute on the enclosing
tag of an ontology.

So an OWL ontology would look something like:

<rdf:RDF owl:imports="foo:bar">
    ...
</rdf:RDF>

where the document pointed at by foo:bar should contain an OWL ontology.
(If it does not, then a null ontology is used.)

It would be nice to allow multiple imports, but this is not possible in
XML, so the value would have to be a list of URLs. 

Other things, like backward compatibility could be handled in the same way.

peter

Received on Thursday, 12 September 2002 15:02:58 UTC