RE: LANG: Moving issues 5.6 and 5.14 forward

I am amused - RDF, which many perceive as a metadata framework, is not used
for carrying the metadata about descriptions of the ontologies used within
it.

I will abstain if this comes to a vote. (I would even abstain in a straw
poll).
(This is of course the thin end of the wedge of not using RDF as our
syntax).

Jeremy


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-webont-wg-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-webont-wg-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Jeff Heflin
> Sent: 24 September 2002 16:35
> To: WebOnt
> Subject: LANG: Moving issues 5.6 and 5.14 forward
>
>
>
> I think an important part of resolving issues 5.6 and 5.14 forward is to
> decide whether or not things like (owl:Ontology, owl:imports,
> owl:backCompatWith, etc.) should be in the domain of discourse (this is
> one of the four major questions from [1]). At last week's telecon and on
> this mailing list, I heard a number of people say that they shouldn't
> even be in the RDF domain of discourse (which is what I originally
> proposed), and I don't recall anyone disagreeing with this position.
> Therefore, I am going to make a proposal that treats these features as
> "magic syntax" that is outside of both the RDF and OWL domains of
> discourse.
>
> Background:
> ------------
> Peter had proposed that imports simply be an attribute on the RDF tag
> [2].
>
> <rdf:RDF owl:imports="foo:bar">
>     ...
> </rdf:RDF>
>
> One problem with this approach is that if there are multiple imports you
> have to use space to delimit them. I think this is a bad idea. Not only
> is it forcing multiple data values into a single "field" (generally
> considered a bad idea in databases), but I think it will make it more
> difficult to use standards like XPath and XSLT to point to portions of
> and transform OWL documents.
>
> Mike had proposed putting the imports information outside of the scope
> of RDF [3], by doing something like:
>
> <owl:include import="uri1" />
>
> <rdf:rdf ...>
>  ...
> </rdf:rdf>
>
> In a separate message, he had suggested replacing the rdf:rdf tags with
> owl:Ontology tags.
>
> My proposal was influenced by each of these ideas.
>
> The Proposal:
> ---------------
> I propose that imports and versioning information be declared outside of
> RDF. In particular I propose the we have an owl:Ontology tag that wraps
> all OWL ontologies. The content of this tag is import and versioning
> tags followed by the RDF content of the ontology. This has the nice side
> effect, that the content of an ontology is finally nested within an
> ontology element.
>
> Here's an example:
>
> <owl:Ontology xmlns="...">
>    <!-- multiple imports are allowed in separate elements -->
>    <owl:imports resource="..." />
>    <owl:imports resource="..." />
>    ...
>    <owl:priorVersion version="..." />
>    <owl:backCompatWith version="..." />
>
>    <rdf:RDF>
>         <!-- all of are class and property statements go here -->
>         ...
>    </rdf:RDF>
> </owl:Ontology>
>
> Thus, RDF parsers can just ignore the surrounding XML content and still
> get "partial understanding" of it. OWL parsers can use this extra
> information in whatever ways are deemed fit for owl.
>
> Please let me know what you think of this proposal. If possible, I'd
> like to find out how many like it, how many can live with it, and how
> many can't live with it.
>
> If we can get agreement on this, then I think we can start tackling the
> issue of how do we define the meaning of imports.
>
> Jeff
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0272.html
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0166.html
> [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0300.html
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 11:09:02 UTC