RE: Proposed response to Golbeck regarding imports issue

> Jim,
> 
> Sorry I don't have the practice writing responses that the rest of you
> do. I'll get this right eventually :-). Anyway, I agree with your
> suggestion to add some wording, and that Reference seems like the best
> place to put it. Paraphrasing part of my proposed response, we could add
> the following to the end of Section 7.3:
> 
> "Note that whether or not an OWL tool must load an imported ontology
> depends on the purpose of the tool. If the tool is a complete reasoner
> (including complete consistency checkers) then it must load all of the
> imported ontologies. Other tools, such as simple editors and incomplete
> reasoners, may choose to load only some or even none of the imported
> ontologies."
> 

Well, as you know I consider this a great can of worms, but anyway, since some
wording is due, I would suggest to drop the positive assertion, and stay in the negative:
that is to say, I would omit the 
> If the tool is a complete reasoner
> (including complete consistency checkers) then it must load all of the
> imported ontologies.
and just leave the rest of the paragraph as is.

Reason to do this:
leaving that sentence means that, as there's a "must", we should then define what 
a "complete reasoner" is (do we want to open this other can of worms too?)

As an aside, note the related counter-can-of-worms: leaving this unspecified, there is the 
potential risk that there is no minimal official "conformance level" an OWL reasoner 
could rely on as far as imports are concerned. Which leaves the way open to abuses 
(suppose you put some info, and then you import your license statements in another file...
some apps could consider them, some other ignore them).

Either way, it's a tough cookie, so in the interest of speeding up things, I would go with
Jeff's wording minus the complete reasoner. Unless we want to tackle frontally the issue, 
in which case, you're welcome, but we should go towards a precise definition of conformance level.
Other solutions are of course possible, but they imply more work, likely breaking the 80/20 rule.

-M

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2003 10:34:42 UTC