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: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:33:41 -0400
> 
> > "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" wrote:
> > >

<snip>

> > > Your approach requires a treatment of ontologies and imports in the
> > > semantics, which raises big issues that I don't want to have to handle in
> > > the semantics.
> >
> > I have to admit, I still don't understand what the big issues in the
> > semantics are.
> 
> Well, if you have ontologies in the domain of discourse, what can you do
> with them?  Can you point to a blank node?  Can you deny importing?  Etc.
> Etc.
> 

But my proposal was not to have ontologies in the domain of discourse,
at least not in the OWL domain of discourse. If we weren't bound by
having to use only RDF syntax, then I would be happy with having
separate syntax for them. However, since the group has decided that RDF
is our syntax, then anything we talk about MUST be in the RDF domain of
discourse. However, I proposed that we use Pat's trick where there is an
RDF domain of discourse with a subset that is the OWL domain of
discourse. I would put owl:Ontology and owl:imports in the first set but
not the second. If this is the case, what are the semantic problems with
saying:

if ontology A imports ontology B then
if B entails P then A entails P

It seems plain and simple to me.

Jeff

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 17:33:00 UTC