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

"Peter F. Patel-Schneider" wrote:
> 
> From: Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>
> Subject: Re: LANG: syntactic version for imports (and other things)
> Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 10:06:27 -0400
> 
> > I'm not wild about this idea. Multiple imports are going to be common
> > and simply having a space delimited list is an ugly solution. Especially
> > since guidelines for designing XML DTDs and Schemas usually suggest that
> > you only use attributes for things that have single values. If we are
> > going to have non-RDF syntactic extensions (which is what this is), we
> > may as well do good design and have a separate XML element for each
> > ontology that is imported.
> 
> I'm not wild about it either.  The problem is that we are fighting both XML
> and RDF here.  There are good syntactic solutions, but they are ruled out
> by either XML or RDF.
> 
> > Also, I expected to see some account of the meaning of this construct.
> > You didn't like my entailment-based version, what would you suggest
> > instead?
> 
> The meaning is the obvious one.  The contents of the imported ontology
> are considered to be part of the meaning of this ontology.

I have to admit I am a bit suprised at this answer, especially since it
is coming from someone who normally holds semantic precision as
something of uptmost importance. What are the "contents" of an ontology?
Is it the RDF syntax? The triples? The abstract syntax? The conditions
imposed on interpretations by the syntax? Do you agree with Mike Smith's
syntactic approach [1]? If so, what about the issues I raised [2]? And
finally, how is this "better" than my entailments based approach? One of
the problems we got into with DAML+OIL is we didn't say what imports
meant, and thus everybody interpreted it to mean whatever they felt
like. If we cannot be perfectly clear about its meaning in OWL then we
have failed.

Jeff

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0167.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0197.html


> > Jeff
> 
> peter

Received on Monday, 16 September 2002 17:59:07 UTC