Why not imports by location?
At the F2F, some people suggested that imports should be by location: if O imports O’, then O should contain the location of O’. Furthermore, there was some discussion about whether the location of the imported ontology should be the same as the ontology URI of the imported ontology. I believe that such a system is not particularly suited to typical scenarios in which OWL is used. I briefly list some of the problems that commonly arise from such a definition. • Whereas finished ontologies may indeed be published on the Web at a location that is identical to the ontology URI, in order for someone to use the ontology, the ontology has to be copied locally. This invariably makes the physical ontology different from its ontology URI. • Some people argue that the problems described under 1 can be thought of as caching. I agree to this view, for the ontologies that originally exist somewhere on the Web and are copied locally for reasoning. However, ontologies will often be developed locally,
