[Pellet-users] owlSite and imports

[Bijan Parsia]

On Sep 6, 2007, at 5:44 PM, Schmitz, Jeffrey A wrote:

> Hello,
>    I was wondering how owlSite handles imported ontologies?

It handles them in the "normal" way, i.e., how the OWL API handles it  
when you don't do anything funky with it (i.e., programmatically set  
up a "physical" URI distinct from the "logical" one).

> Do the
> imported ontologies need to reside at their URI location on the  
> internet
> for owlsite to be able to pick them up and reason with them?

Yes, at least at the moment. Oh, wait, they need to reside at the URI  
which is the object of an imports statement. Their logical uri could  
be different. And I imagine file:// uris would fail.

>   Is there
> another way in case that's not an option?

If you can programmatically merge the ontologies, that would do the  
trick. I presume you mean that the ontologies can't be made public at  
all? I don't know if a browser can javascriptly punk through the  
filesystem so a catalog work around might be tricky. You could always  
run a webserver off your local machine and serve the files that way.

So there are two challenges if you are unwilling to change the object  
of your owl:imports statement for OWLSight:
	1) how to know where to get the ontologies (since the uri in the  
statement may not tell you where the ont is)
	2) how OWLSight would handle things like loading from the file  
system from within a browser

The first is being tackled by an OWLED task force:
	<http://code.google.com/p/owl1-1/wiki/ImportsManagement>

I'm not so clear about the latter. Mike?

(The easiest work around at the moment is to change your ontology to  
point to a localhost http server.)

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Bijan.