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

From: "Smith, Michael K" <michael.smith@eds.com>
Subject: RE: LANG: syntactic version for imports (and other things)
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 10:08:12 -0500

> Well now that I have slept on my flame I have a concrete suggestion.
> 
> MOTIVIATION
> 
> There is a desire to 
> 
> 1. indicate that a set of class, property, and individual definitions
> are part of an ontology using a natural scoping mechanism (even if
> this is an extra-logical relationship),
> 
> 2. provide a strictly syntactic explanation for imports (at least I
> would like to see this), and
> 
> 3. maintain the basic RDF striping XML syntax.
> 
> Note that RDF tools are going to need to make some slight changes
> already (for example to support parsetype collection).
> 
> SUGGESTION
> 
> Define owl:ontology to be an extended alias for rdf:rdf.  An OWL
> ontology would then look like
> 
> <owl:ontology about=""
>               xmlns="#" 
>               xmlns:rdf=...>
>  <owl:imports about="" rdf:resource="uri1">
>  ...
> </owl:ontology>

Good idea, particularly having OWL documents be RDF documents (or whatever
the the top-level of RDF is called) but owl:ontology elements instead of
rdf:RDF elements.  However, then the imports stuff is a node element, and
not a property element.

> The 'about' attribute (ignored by RDF) defines a name for the
> ontology.  The standard cliche defaults to the document URL, 
> but we could insert an explicit URI if desired.
> I believe that well engineered ontologies will want to be associated
> with a URN so that they are not tied to a physical location.

> I'm still not clear on whether we want to introduce an ontology
> resource into the RDF triple world.  We could always leave off the
> 'about=""' in the imports clause and get an existential triple like
> 
> _g001 owl:imports uri1

A node element doesn't work this way.

> In either case, the expansion of the imports could then be made to
> work in a natural way, but would require supporting multiple
> owl:ontology expressions in one file.  E.g.

Expansion of imports doesn't have to result in a ``file''.  It can be
handled in a special way in the syntax.

> <owl:ontology about=""
>               xmlns="#" 
>               xmlns:rdf=...>
>  ...
> </owl:ontology>
> 
> <owl:ontology xml:Base="uri1"
>               xmlns:ns11="uri11" ...
>               xmlns:ns1i="uri1i" 
>               about=""> 
>  ... 
> </owl:ontology>
> 
> - Mike

Received on Tuesday, 17 September 2002 11:29:36 UTC