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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-webont-wg-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-webont-wg-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Christopher Welty
> Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 9:10 PM
> To: www-webont-wg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: LANG: syntactic version for imports (and other things)
>
>
>
> I am really missing something, and I still haven't heard an answer on
> this:
>
> WHAT IS THE POINT of referencing a symbol from another external ontology
> if you don't get, as a consequence of referencing it, the meaning of that
> symbol as defined in that ontology?
>
> As others have already repeatedly pointed out, there is no way to
> "extract" the definition of a symbol from an ontology, so the only way to
> get it is to include the whole ontology it is defined in.
Chris, I'll try to answer for Frank here, and disentangle the core of the issue, as I wholeheartedly agree with him.
It all depends on the meaning you give to your URI symbol. If it's just a symbol, then it's not associated with the Web, in the
sense that each URI is just a label (it could be a URN too....), like a namespace.
The actual meaning of the symbol has then to be retrieved in other ways, i.e., specifying somewhere where you can find an ontology
talking about the symbol.
To this extent, note the post in [1] and related thread is relevant (alas, they're almost the same thread but with different
subjects...).
What you are thinking of coincides with a different interpretation, where the symbol URI itself allows you to locate its ontology.
This is an alternate design, which has disadvantages, last but not least, that you are excluding classes of URIs (like URNs), and
forcing every URI you use to be retrievable.

> This has nothing to do with reasoning over the entire web.  It's just
> reasoning over the part of the web you claim you are consistent with.
Here, I agree with you, Frank's wording is an oversimplification (not easy to solve the consistency problem in two lines...), but
the essence is that you choose where the ontologies are, not the symbols themselves.

-M

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Sep/0430.html

Received on Thursday, 26 September 2002 11:59:02 UTC