Re: Proposed response to Golbeck regarding imports issue

From: Jeff Heflin <heflin@cse.lehigh.edu>
Subject: Proposed response to Golbeck regarding imports issue
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 13:28:52 -0400

> 
> The following is a proposed response to Jennifer Golbeck regarding the
> issue with imports raised in:
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webont-comments/2003May/0068.html
> 
> Dear Jennifer,

[...]

> First you discuss the following passage from the reference document,
> 7.3:
> 
> "Note that the importing a document is different than creating a
> namespace reference. owl:imports do not set up a shorthand notation for
> names as does a namespace reference. On the other hand, the namespace
> reference does not imply that all (or even any) ontological terms from
> that namespace are being imported. Therefore, it is common to have a
> corresponding namespace declaration for any ontology that is
> imported."
> 
> You are correct that there are a few problems here: First, we are
> inventing the term "namespace reference" when we mean "namespace
> declaration." Second, the point of this paragraph was to comment on why
> namespace declarations and imports are both needed, not to comment on
> how systems might follow links. In particular, we were trying to say
> that they are very different animals. I suggest the following rewording:
> 
> "Note that although owl:imports and namespace declarations may appear
> redundant, they actually serve very different purposes. Namespace
> declarations simply set up a shorthand for referring to identifiers.
> They do not implicitly include the meaning of documents located at the
> URI (although some applications may choose to process these documents in
> addition to the original document). On the other hand, owl:imports does
> not provide any shorthand notation for referring to the identifiers from
> the imported document. Therefore, it is common to have a corresponding
> namespace declaration for any ontology that is imported."

[...]

I oppose including the parenthetical remark above.  I believe that such
permissive statements have no place in our documents.

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research
Lucent Technologies

Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 08:48:04 UTC