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Re: [ontolog-forum] Levels

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Chris Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>
Cc: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:32:15 -0500
Message-id: <p06110434c1f94aeca628@[192.168.0.104]>
>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)

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