>If by 'subject matter' you mean that it is in the
>universe of discourse, yes. But all sorts of
>things are in the universe of discourse of any
>reasonably complicated assertion: your TAMU
>example may well refer to numbers, dates,
>time-intervals, publications, etc.. If you use
>'imports' it also refers to ontologies
>(considered as Web entities). If this bothers
>you, you shouldn't be using 'imports'. You can
>always grab the actual ontology text using a Web
>browser and cut and paste it into your document,
>if you don't want to use an imports statement. (01)
Imports are fundamentally different from cut-and-paste. That's
because in an open world environment, things change. The specs tend
to ignore this issue, but it's very real. (02)
If somebody changes the ontology I imported (I know they're not
"supposed" to, but people on open networks do things they're not
"supposed" to do), then my ontoloyg changes. If the organization that
created an ontology I import goes bankrupt and their server goes down
and the ontology disappears and references ground out in a 404, then
my ontology is broken. (03)
If I cut and paste, then the snapshot of the ontology that existed in
the cut and paste is what I get, and how it stays. However, the
semantic information (yes, it's semantic information, not about the
domain for which the ontology was constructed, but about my ontology)
that I imported Ont-X is lost, except perhaps in some
non-machine-interpretable comments I write in my ontology. In other
words, the link from my ontology to the ontology I imported is gone. (04)
Kathy (05)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (06)
|