Re: Proposed response to Golbeck regarding imports issue

On June 17, Jim Hendler writes:
> 
> 
> >
> >>  In certain contexts, I think OWL would be useful with some ontologies
> >>  preimported.
> >
> >Well, this would not be OWL.
> 
> With due respect Peter, this must either be the dumbest thing I ever 
> heard you say or, more likely, we're somehow not understanding each 
> other.  Most of our tools enable the user to start with ontologies 
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What you describe here are OWL tools, not the OWL language.

If I were Dan, what I would do is produce a <<tool>> that checked on
the usage of namespaces in an OWL ontology and automatically added
the import statements that I wanted. This would allow my applications
to work the way I wanted using reasoning that would still be sound
w.r.t. the OWL language spec.

Regards, Ian 




> pre-imported -- for example we are building a cancer research project 
> that starts from the NCI OWL Lite ontology.  It comes preloaded.  If, 
> on the other hand, we started from having the user hit a button and 
> import that ontology, it would not come preloaded.  I cannot see how 
> this would make any difference to whether something is OWL or not.
> 
> My suspicion is there is some deeper issue which you are responding 
> to. If we're just arguing about how the term "is OWL" is used, then 
> it isn't worth much time, because the use of our vocabulary is out of 
> our control once we publish it.
> 
>   -JH
> 
> -- 
> Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
> Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
> Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
> Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  *** 240-277-3388 (Cell)
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Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 09:12:16 UTC