RDFS & import & reasoning

[Maatari Daniel Okouya]

Dear Everyone,

I'm new to RDFS and I would like to understand something that i can't  
figure out by myself.

I would like to know if RDFS reasoner support ontology import. What i  
mean is that in OWL it is clear that to import an ontology and not  
just identify  the external element via namespace, it is required to  
use the import statement. this way all the definition including  
assertion axiom of the imported ontology are available in the  
importing ontology.

However this mechanism do not exist in RDF. I suppose that it is the  
reason why, RDFS necessitate a specific native support in the tools.  
That , the tools such as jena already posses the definition of RDFS.  
My question now would be:

If i define, an ontology using RDFS in a file let say onto1 and create  
another ontology in another file onto2 that use terms defined in  
onto1. Can the jena reasoner properly reason on onto2. will it be able  
to recover information from onto1. If yes, what are the proper  
contruct in RDFS/XML to support the import. Is this behavior Jena  
specific or any reasoner can?



Many thanks