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Joint OpenOntologyRepository-OntologySummit2008 Panel Discussion Session - Thu 3-April-2008

  • Subject: An Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements - Session-2
  • Session co-chairs:
    • Dr. LeoObrst (MITRE) &
    • Dr. FabianNeuhaus (NIST)
  • Panelists:
  • Dr. DougLenat (Cycorp) - "Is OpenCyc doomed to be the new Esperanto, or is OOR doomed to be the new Electronic Data Interchange, or -- even worse -- both!"
  • Mr. DekeSmith (NBIS) - "National Building Information Modeling Standard"
  • Professor MarciaZeng (Kent State U) - "Issues in reusing and sharing the content of thesauri and taxonomies in OOR"
  • Dr. DeniseBedford (WorldBank) - "Practical Requirements for Every Day Ontology Management and Use"
  • Dr. PatHayes (IHMC) - "Describing Concept Relationships"
  • Ms. MalaMehrotra (Pragati) - "Exposing and Capturing Mapping Relationships across OOR resources"
  • Dr. RobRaskin (NASA/JPL) - "SWEET 2.0 Ontology"

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, April 3, 2008
  • Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 7:30pm CEST / 17:30 UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: ~2.5 hours
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Attendees

  • Other Expecting Attendees (who may have joined us after the roll call):
    • RobertArp
    • Yung S Kim (Boeing)
    • Carl Mattocks
    • Elgar Pichler (Astra Zeneca)
    • ... to register for participation, please add your name (plus your affiliation, if you aren't already a member of the community) above, or e-mail <peter.yim@cim3.com> so that we can reserve enough resources to support everyone's participation. ...

Background

Two parallel initiatives are ongoing in the community, revolving around the theme of "Open Ontology Repository". On the one hand, a working group under the auspices of the OpenOntologyRepository Initiative, and on the other, the discourse (and essentially a discussion group that culminates in a two-day workshop) conducted as the main focus for OntologySummit2008.

It is at the intersection of these two initiatives that this panel discussion session is being held. The OpenOntologyRepository team is taking the opportunity to have some of its members who are bringing technology and infrastructure to the table to present them side-by-side, and to discuss how these can all fit nicely together. The Ontology Summit 2008 folks, on the other hand would want to take the opportunity to survey (at least a subset of) the technology & infrastructure landscape to gain insight into the state-of-art in Ontology Registry and Repository.

Besides hearing from the panelists, we are setting aside ample time after their briefings, for some good Q&A and discussions among all who are participating in this session.

Refer to details at the respective project homepages of the two initiatives at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository . & . http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2008

Agenda & Proceedings

  • This is the second of two panel discussion sessions on "Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements." We are attemptig to bring together some of the world's top ontological content custodians and researchers, to participate in this panel discussion sessions. Besides hearing from the panelists, we are setting aside ample time (~45 minutes) after their briefings, for some good Q&A and discussions among all who will be participating in this sessions.
  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call.

Title: An Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements

Abstracts:

  • Panelists - "Title" and Remarks
    • DougLenat - "Is OpenCyc doomed to be the new Esperanto, or is OOR doomed to be the new Electronic Data Interchange, or -- even worse -- both!"
    • DekeSmith - "National Building Information Modeling Standard"
    • MarciaZeng - "Issues in reusing and sharing the content of thesauri and

taxonomies in OOR"

      • 1. Introduce some terminology services (products and research projects)
      • 2. Bring up major issues in reusing and sharing the content of thesauri and taxonomies.
    • DeniseBedford - "Practical Requirements for Every Day Ontology Management and Use"
    • PatHayes - "Describing Concept Relationships"
    • MalaMehrotra - "Exposing and Capturing Mapping Relationships across OOR resources"
      • here are the top two questions I will be addressing for the panel discussion:
        • What are the various types of relationships that would be useful to discover across resources in OOR?
        • What do we need in our knowledge representation formalisms to capture such relationships?
    • RobRaskin - "SWEET 2.0 Ontology"

Resources

  • this session is a continuation from session-1, details of which can be found at: ConferenceCall_2008_03_27
    • to minimize duplication of discussions on issues already covered at the last session, participants who were not with us last week are encouraged to catch up from the Mar-27 session proceedings.
  • additional resources:
    • (... to be added by the panel)

Questions, Answers & Discourse

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  • For those who have further questions or remarks on the topic, please post them to the [ontology-summit] forum so that everyone in the community can benefit from the discourse. (One needs to be subscribed to this archived mailing list first before posting. See subscription details here.)

Questions and Discussion captured from the chat session

VNC2: Welcome to the: Joint OpenOntologyRepository-OntologySummit2008 Panel Discussion Session

Subject: An Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements - Session-2

Peter P. Yim: to all the "anonymous' participants, Please change your name from 'anonymous' using

the Settings button to your real name (in WikiWord format)

Peter Benson: At the 3rd IEEE Conference on Standardization held on October 24, 2003

Timothy Schoechle from the International Center for Standards Research at

the University of Colorado, Boulder presented an interesting paper titled

Digital Enclosure: The Privatization of Standards and Standardization, in which

he made the following statement:

In the field of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) such standards

specify everything from the prongs on plugs and cables to the software protocols

that make the Internet work. Historically, these standards have been set largely

by volunteer participants in committees that operate within a wide range of

environments, institutional rules and social practices; but in general they have

espoused a traditional commitment to general principles of democratic deliberation,

consensus, public accessibility and balanced stakeholder representation.

The historical practice is now being challenged by newer, more private organizations

that do not necessarily have a commitment to the same principles.

we must be careful that the OOR clearly highlights any restrictions on the use of

any ontology included in the OOR.

Ravi Sharma: Dr. Doug Lenat Is there an attempt in OpenCyc or ResearchCyc to categorise the type

and complexity of relationships that improve the usability of the millions of

assertions, any analysis done?

Doug Lenat: Answer to Ravi: Yes, we actually chose the OpenCyc relations to be the most useful ones

from full Cyc. And we would be happy to revisit that and add more as other people

point out useful ones from Cyc that we haven't included.

Leo Obrst: Question to Doug: Given Cyc's long experience with such matters, can you provide the

OOR group with what you would suggest as a "small set of inter-ontology alignment relations"?

Which are necessary and which are desirable?

Doug Lenat: Response to Leo: Yes, I would be happy to provide the set of (surprisingly few) predicates

we use to state those inter-ontology correspondences. I will send that out and/or post it

today or tomorrow.

Bill Bug: Dr. Lenat - I strongly agree with your identifying the need for synonymy mapping.

A few questions -

(1) given Dr. Zeng's presentation, do you think SKOS works for this purpose?

(2) Should SKOS be used in OWL, where SKOS would essentially provide an orthogonal

semantics for managing an ontology lexicon?

(3) Should an OOR adopt a particular standard for providing these synonymous mappings?

Doug Lenat: Response to Bill Bug: Take a look at what I just promised for Leo, and then see if

that answers your question. I was pleased to see what SKOS does in this particular

area, and need to look at it in more detail. We need e.g. to represent cases where

one concept is merely strongly related to one in another ontology, not equivalent

to it, and if you're not careful there is a slippery slope where you end up wanting

all of the predicates you use WITHIN your ontology because after all those are the

predicates you deemed worthy/important to interrelate the terms in your ontology,

so it only makes sense that you might want to use them among ontologies.

Somewhere between that (everything) and n=1 (equivalentConceptInOntology) is the

sweet spot of the curve.

Pat Hayes: Doug: please include me in that inter-ontology mailing, thanks.

Doug Lenat: Will do

Peter P. Yim: to Dr. Lenat: do you see enough differentiation even for the OOR team implementation

effort (note, not the Ontology Summit 2008 intelectual pursuit) to exists. If so, how

should this effort line up with the LarKC

Rex Brooks: Question for Deke: Are you aware of the City GML effort?

Leo Obrst: Question for Deke: The NBIMS (slide 8, for example) seems to consist of multiple taxonomies,

is that right? Do you need relations among the nodes too?

Pat Hayes: Question for Marcia: Can you enlarge on the point on your slide 18? What do you mean by

'non-symmetrical' here?

Marcia Zeng: Pat, for example, under 'tax', the sub-classes or narrower terms in different versions

from different countries are different even they all fit in the same multi-lingual thesaurus.

Pat Hayes: Thanks, Marcia.

Ravi Sharma: Dr. Marcia Zeng - What would happen to the content of current ontologies if we were to

exclude relationships associated with Thesauri and Taxonomies (the natural language

free flow usage e.g. less logic based). How much would be left? Further, is there a

value chain concept of Information content from complexity or concatenation of relationships?

Further many times I get a feeling that knowledge and understanding floodgates would open

if we could transform (transliterate or map) concepts and understanding from major cultural

and lingual groups alone?

Marcia Zeng: Dr. Ravi Sharma,

1. I think even though the relationships are not consistently logic and highly structured,

many hierarchical relationships best presented in the domain which do not have a

widely accepted 'taxonomy' like in biology. So, if you only want to use the work for

controlling synonyms and disambiguate terms, you may miss lots of good hierarchical structures.

2. Yes, it is difficult to map among the multilingual and multi-cultural vocabularies,

e.g., about traditional medicine or even geographic regions.

Pat Hayes: Question for Denise: can you enlarge on your distinction between metadata and metainformation?

I'm not familiar with the second term.

Ravi Sharma: Ms. Mala Mehrotra As we have in astrophysical coordinate systems, or in translating

among different inertial and other reference coordinate systems, are solvers and translators

similarly being conceptualized among different ontology representations of TIME or

INTERVAL or DURATION?

Ravi Sharma: Ms. Mala Mehrotra - Further, is the value of human collaboration in terms of enriching

the value of domain based relationships for future automated processing and is there a

roadmap for the same with use cases?

Ravi Sharma: Dr. Rob Raskin Is slide 5 a hierarchical relationship among ontologies or is it taxonomy

of science disciplines? Especially since the type of relationships are not indicated among them?

Leo Obrst: Question to Rob: Is the "Data Ontology" the same as the SWEET ontologies, or is the former part

of SWEET? And do you find you need "rules"?

Leo Obrst: Question to Rob: What kind of methodology did you use in the creation of the SWEET ontologies,

i.e., requirements-driven (competency questions?) and then what kind of review process, and

gateway/quality criteria?

Peter P. Yim: to Dr. Raskin ... given your prevailing work in SWEET and PlanetOnt.org (which is an OOR in

its own right), I would like to invite you to join us in the OOR-team (which is cast as an

implementation effort, independent of the Ontology Summit 2008 effort, which focuses in the

intellectual discussion of the Open Ontology Repository & Resgistry subject matter.) see:

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository

Peter P. Yim: the same invitation goes to anyone else who want to contribute to the OOR-implementation effort

Leo Obrst: Question to Marcia: I think you are saying that the OOR will need both terminological resources

and ontologies/conceptual resources? Do you think SKOS can provide a terminological framework

for term taxonomies/thesari and perhaps a term->concept indexing into ontologies?

Marcia Zeng: Leo: yes I think the terminological resources could be part of the conceptual resources.

Some 'ontologies' claimed on the Web are no better than a taxonomy.

Marcia Zeng: Leo: SKOS probably can handle well thesauri, but, for how to present mapping results,

SKOS may not be perfect so far. It is working on that direction.

Todd Schneider: Pat, Moving towards 'truth' should be seen as the 'to-be' that an OOR will evolve too.

Pat Hayes: Todd, I think that many of us would strongly disagree. Which was exactly my main point.

Michelle Raymond: Panelists - It was noted that the Architecture for an Ontology Repository may differ

depending on the Ontologies held (and? the relationships between held Ontologies).

If this is so, I suspect this is not simply based on the complexity of the Ontologies

(dictionary, taxonomy, relational data map, ontology, ontologies with guiding upper

ontology...) A) Can we have one Arch. approach? If the statement before is accepted,

what are the characteristics that direct you toward selection of the Architecture

structure? Examples?

Pat Hayes: Michelle: depends what you mean by 'architecture'. As far as management/metadata issues go,

I think there can be a common uniform framework. But if that means all using the same ontology

language, for example, then I'd say no, for an open ontology.

Todd Schneider: Can we use the TOGAF notion of 'architecture'?

Michelle Raymond: Reply to Todd re TOGAF - My understanding of TOGAF is only at the higher level of

different "layers" for enterprise level structures and rules, data structuring and

storage, components and application availability and connectivity and ? I think the

"network" level. These are important and part of the framework for any architecture.

Where a thread might help is in describing the notation of TOGAF and suggestions as

to its usefulness. Does the TOGAF force a specific direction of centralized,

decentralized, federated or other core concept for architecture data locations and

management practices?

Todd Schneider: Leo, Would it be possible to extend your list of requirements by culling the presentations

from these last two meetings?

Peter P. Yim: to Todd, answering your question for Leo ... YES, of course (this is what these panel discussion

sessions were designed for)

Michelle Raymond: Reply to ToddSchneider's question to Leo - Absolutely, the Content Committee is culling

these presentations and question threads. However, it is very helpful for individuals to

push forward their personal favorite Ah-ha's and questions as new discussion threads on the

Ontology Summit 2008 list.

Ken Baclawski: Leo asked at the last session if the panelists could prioritize their requirements.

Specifically he asked about the top three services of an OOR.

Doug Lenat: See my slide 9: the 4 things we would want from a good host

Doug Lenat: Commons (not GNU) license; provenance kept; agreement on at least a few key relations;

agreement on inter-ontology relations.

Pat Hayes: doug: why not the GNU licence? Too "open" ??

Audio Recording of this Session

  • To download the audio recording of the session, click here
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  • Conference Date and Time: 03-Apr-2008 10:45am~1:03pm PDT
  • Duration of Recording: 2 Hour 16 Minutes
  • Recording File Size: 15.5 MB (in mp3 format)
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Join us at the next OOR-Panel Discussion - see: ConferenceCall_2008_04_10



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