Re: Proposed response to Golbeck regarding imports issue

[snip lots of messages from thread]


Chair hat very much on:

I will remind the group that we did discuss and resolve this issue. 
We decided that if there was an imports statement, then the ontology 
pointed to should be imported (i.e. all the stuff w/imports closure 
and etc.)
  We also agreed that if there was not an imports statement, then OWL 
did NOT commit one to either importing or not importing.
  Dan and I objected to the former (that imports should be included). 
The latter was never an issue because none of our documents insist on 
this.  In OWL DL it is the case that an external reference needs to 
be an annotation, but no decision was made as to whether annotations 
should or should not be imported - at least not that I can find in 
our records.  In OWL Full, there should be no commitment one way or 
the other -- this was an issue discussed at the Bristol f2f, and 
continued for a long time after.  The decision recorded in our 
records is in:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2002Nov/0004.html
and you will see it says nothing about whether a namespace reference 
(or other naming) does or does not import.

I have not noticed anything in our documents that prohibits the 
importation in this case, and Dan is right -- if I had read that 
implication in what Jeff said, I would not have approved it -- since, 
as Dan points out, what Jeff wrote could be interpreted as saying 
"Does Not import" (as opposed to saying "doesn't necessarily import") 
- it should be changed to be clearer.

  -JH

p.s. Chair hat off: for what it is worth, my opinion is diametrically 
opposed to Dan's as to how these references should be handled - I 
think they must NOT cause imports.  But it is precisely because we 
disagree that we left this unspecified and up to individual 
implementations to make clear -- Anyone who doesn't want to take a 
risk can
  i. use imports if they want imports
  ii. copy and paste to their own document if they want to make sure 
nothing is imported beyond what they intended.






-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
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