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Ontolog Forum

Number 01
Duration 1.5 hour
Date/Time September 25 2008 17:30 GMT
10:30am PDT/1:30pm EDT
6:30pm BST/7:30pm CET
Convener KenBaclawski MikeBennett

Emerging Ontology Showcase

Work Product Showcase kick-off session

Agenda

  • Session Co-chair:
    • Professor KenBaclawski (Northeastern University) and Mr. MikeBennett (Hypercube Ltd., UK)
  • Panelists / Briefings:
    • Mr. MikeBennett (Hypercube Ltd., London UK) - "The EDM Council Semantics Repository: Building global consensus for the Financial Services Industry"
    • Mr. MikeBergman (Zitgist LLC) - "UMBEL: A Lightweight Subject Reference Structure for the Web"

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, September 25, 2008
  • Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 6:30pm BST / 7:30pm CEST / 17:30 UTC
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Attendees

  • Other resgustered participants (who might have joined us after the roll call):
    • JuanSequeda
    • 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. ...

Agenda & Proceedings

  • Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call.
  • Agenda:
    • 1. Opening by the Session co-chair - Ken Baclawski
    • 2. we'll go around with a self-introduction of participants (~10 minutes) - All - we'll skip this if we have more than 25 participants (in which case, it will be best if members try to update their namesake pages on this wiki prior to the call so that everyone can get to know who's who more easily.)
    • 3. Presentations from the Panelists - Mike Bennett, MikeBergman (35 min. each)
    • 4. General Discussion - ALL (20 min.)
    • 5. Summary / Follow-up plans & actions / Conclusion - session co-chairs, Ken Baclawski & Mike Bennett

Topic: Emerging Ontology Work Product Showcase (session-1)

Abstract by Ken Baclawski / MikeBennett

The number of publicly available ontologies is growing rapidly, with search engines reporting over 10,000 already. This is the beginning of a mini-series intended to provide a venue for the developers of major new ontologies to present their work products to the ontology community. Each session will showcase 2 or 3 important ontologies that were recently released or updated.
Refer also to details at the project homepage for this mini-series at: EmergingOntologyShowcase

The EDM Council Semantics Repository: Building global consensus for the Financial Services Industry - MikeBennett

Abstract: This session will present the semantics model created by Hypercube for the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council).
MikeBOnBoat_a.jpg [Mr. Mike Bennett]
The EDM Council is a non-profit trade association focussed on managing and leveraging enterprise data as a strategic asset to enable financial institutions to increase efficiency, minimize risk, and create competitive advantage. To this end they have commissioned a semantics repository in order to achieve an industry consensus view of terms in the industry, which would be owned and validated by business rather than technology.
The Semantics Repository has been built primarily to identify individual meaningful terms. We have implemented this based on the OWL ontology language, but with certain important departures. This introduction to the Repository will focus on those aspects of the repository design. An important commitment of this model is that it must be reviewable by business subject matter experts with no prior exposure to any modeling language or format.
A key feature of the Repository is the terms not specific to the financial services world. These are identified as "Global Terms" in the repository and form the basis of an upper ontology, from which the industry-specific terms have been derived. This has been richly structured, for example using the upper level classes identified in Dr John F Sowa's Knowledge Representation (KR) ontology lattice. In so doing we believe we have solved a number of definition problems that are prevalent in the financial services industry, such as the identification of roles and parties in securities transactions and issuance.
This is very much a work in progress and we are keen to align with best practice in the format and structure, and with existing global or upper ontology terms where we can match these to the structure used in this model.

UMBEL: A Lightweight Subject Reference Structure for the Web - MikeBergman

mkbergman_a.jpg [Mr. Mike Bergman]
Abstract: UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a

lightweight ontology for relating Web content and data to a standard set of 20,000 subject concepts. Its purpose is to provide a fixed set of reference points in a global knowledge space about what content "is about". These subject concepts have defined relationships between them, and can act as binding or attachment points for any Web content or data. Connecting to the UMBEL structure thus provides context to Web data. In this manner, Web data can be linked, made interoperable, and more easily navigated and discovered.

The UMBEL subject concepts and structure are a direct derivation

from Cyc. The ontology uses a more limited set of predicates mostly based on SKOS. OWL Full is also used to enable UMBEL's subject concepts to act both as classes and instances. This design is in keeping with UMBEL's role as an organizational framework for external semantic Web ontologies and tie-ins to named entity dictionaries.

UMBEL is presently mapped to about 20 common semantic Web

ontologies and 1.5 million instances from Wikipedia. It also now provides a subject concept class structure to DBpedia. The UMBEL design is being extended to domain-specific ontologies. It is freely available and provided as linked data.

Panelists' Presentation

  • additional resources from the panelists:
    • (... to be added by the panel)

Questions, Answers & Discourse

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  • Session ended 2008.09.25 12:41 pm PDT

Questions and Discussion captured from the chat session

Peter P. Yim: Welcome to the Ontolog Emerging Ontology Showcase: Session-1 - Thu 25-September-2008

  • Subject: "Emerging Ontology Work Product Showcase" panel session
  • Session Co-chair: (1MG2)

o Professor Ken Baclawski (Northeastern University) and Mr. Mike Bennett (Hypercube Ltd., UK)

  • Panelists / Briefings: (1MG4)

o Mr. Mike Bennett (Hypercube Ltd., UK) - "The EDM Council Semantics Repository: Building global consensus for the Financial Services Industry"

o Mr. MikeBergman (Zitgist LLC) - "UMBEL: A Lightweight Subject Reference Structure for the Web"

Peter P. Yim: Please refer to details on the session page at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_09_25

Peter P. Yim: Question for Mike Bennett - how much influence does the EDM Council have to get its constituency to adopt/conform to

the set of standardized terms that you have developed? ... who is in that constituency anyway?

Ravi Sharma: What are the plans for the human readable definitions to be converted to Structured English that is semantically

understood by machine? Will OWL association mentioned enough for the same?

Todd Schneider: Mike Bennett, Is there any intent to use this work to support processes?

Mike Bennett: Todd: yes. the "occurrent" partition allows me to create a whole set of upper ontology building blocks for processes.

Ravi Sharma: Are there ebXML like contracts that are semantically more rich and less ambiguous that can be executed in B2B sense?

Ravi Sharma: Can we define in John's KR the actual terms that the business vocabularies people in various standards and

practicing communities standards are using? still the grammer will only be partially addressed as all needed

relationships and dependences will not be addrassed?

Ravi Sharma: Great talk and connections with current work.

Susan Turnbull: Mike Bennett, Would you be willing to talk with someone from US - re: e-discovery generally and e-discovery

associated with subprime litigation?

Todd Schneider: Mike Bergman: Your voice comms is cutting in and out

Ravi Sharma: MikeBergman - your partial relevance type notion - will it also have some associated stochastic behavior

such as probability that the relationship might be valid, etc.?

Ravi Sharma: How are changing things - evolving THING or dynamic thing and associative chaging relationships handled

in CYC and in UMBEL in terms of Concepts, etc?

Ravi Sharma: excellent relevance in deep dive visualization, most of the objects (THINGS) have valid names and I will

also look at relationships as we proceed.Just a feedback.

Ravi Sharma: are the connections to other ontologies serviced by Web Services that are semantically interconnected such as

for example the name or concept or subject translation from UMBEL to other ontological corresponding entities?

Ravi Sharma: Derived from Cyc and dependency on Cyc, does that provide any set of tests for validating ontologies?

Ravi Sharma: Great work.

Susan Turnbull: for Mike Bennett - Is there anticipated congruence / interest from the International Accounting Standards Board?

SvenVanPoucke: Thank you all for this interesting meeting ... Cheers Sven Van Poucke

Peter P. Yim: bye, everyone! thank you for the participation and contribution

Mike Bennett: Thanks Peter, it's been a pleasure!

Mike Bennett: MikeBergman - excellent presentation, it seems you are talking what I'm wondering how to do, in terms of

how to align with usable terms that already exist.

Antoinette Arsic: I have so much to learn and am still reading Logic for Dummies and other readings by John Sowa and

recommended readings from Chris Menzel, Pat Hayes and others on category theory and math.

Mike Bennett: Are you reading the exchanges between Pat Hayes and John F. Sowa in the discussion forum?

Antoinette Arsic: Yes, most of them - some of the higher level ones or rather philosophical are easier to follow

than the detailed math ones

Antoinette Arsic: Thank you Peter and both Mikes - over and out

Mike Bennett: It took me a long train journey to catch up with all that, but it was very informative

Mike Bennett: MikeBergman: Thanks for your patience in the questions session, sorry my answers were a bit long.

Audio Recording of this Session

  • To download the audio recording of the session, click here
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  • Conference Date and Time: 25-Sep-2008 10:40am~12:41pm PDT
  • Duration of Recording: 1 Hours54 Minutes
  • Recording File Size: 13.0 MB (in mp3 format)
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