Pat, (01)
I would claim that an ontology could be open in the
same sense that programs can be open. (02)
PH> I don't think it makes sense to refer to an ontology
> as being open (or not). (03)
Although an ontology is not likely to be compiled to
executable machine code, it can be converted to internal
representations that are humanly unreadable. For example,
some would regard OWL as having that property. But OWL can
be translated back to more readable notations, if desired. (04)
However, anyone who wanted to keep the knowledge representation
proprietary -- including the ontology, axioms, etc. -- could
certainly do so by compiling them to some proprietary form. (05)
There could be many reasons for doing such a compilation.
RDF and OWL, for example, are extremely verbose, and many
systems compile them to more efficient forms for processing.
If those internal forms are kept proprietary, the effect
would be to keep the ontology as "closed" as any program. (06)
John (07)
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