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On 2/17/15 8:07 PM, Thomas Baker wrote: > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 11:04:10AM +1000, Holger Knublauch wrote: >> Yet, there used to be a notion of a Semantic Web, in which people >> were able to publish ontologies together with shared semantics. On >> this list and also the WG it seems that this has come out of >> fashion, and everyone seems "obsessed" with the ability to violate >> the published semantics. > Hi Holger, > > I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that people on > this list want to violate published semantics?? If someone publishes an ontology at a URL, they propose a contract that describes how this ontology should be used. Sometimes owl:Restrictions are used for that. Anyone who owl:imports the file from URL will get this meaning. The concept of "shapes" was largely motivated by people who have use cases in which the same URIs (classes and properties) will have different meaning. As long as they only narrow down the owl:Restrictions, there was never a problem. You'd only need to switch certain published restrictions off when you want to extend them. What people usually do is they just create a new ontology that uses the same URIs but with different restrictions. This distinction between a local copy and the published copy is crucial. This is what I meant with violating, but the word is probably too strong (sorry I am not a native English speaker so I may have picked the wrong term). In any case, it looks like the concept of ldom:context will be useful as an alternative solution to all this. It will allow people to still import a shared ontology, but then pick and chose which constraints they want to use and which ones not. Holger