Note that whether or not an OWL tool must load an imported ontology depends on the purpose of the tool. If the tool is a complete reasoner (including complete consistency checkers) then it must load all of the imported ontologies. Other tools, such as simple editors and incomplete reasoners, may choose to load only some or even none of the imported ontologies.
Although owl:imports and namespace declarations may appear redundant, they actually serve different purposes. Namespace declarations simply set up a shorthand for referring to identifiers. They do not implicitly include the meaning of documents located at the URI. On the other hand, owl:imports does not provide any shorthand notation for referring to the identifiers from the imported document. Therefore, it is common to have a corresponding namespace declaration for any ontology that is imported.
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