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Ontolog Forum

OntologySummit2009 Planning Session - Thu 2008-12-18

  • Subject: Ontologies as the Next Generation of Information Standards
  • Co-chair: Steve Ray & Peter P. Yim
  • Agenda: This is a communitywide brainstorming and planning session for OntologySummit2009.

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, December 18, 2008
  • Start Time: 10:30am PST / 12:30pm CST / 1:30pm EST / 7:30pm CET / 18:30 UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: ~1.5 hours
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Attendees

Agenda Ideas

(Please add below, and identify yourself for follow-up purposes)

  • ...

Agenda & Proceedings

1. Meeting called to order:

  • review and adopt agenda

2. Roll Call:

3. Discussions:

  • Ontology Summits - Overview and what has come before - using the chat
  • the dates
    • Launch Meeting: 15-Jan-2009
    • Face-to-face workshop: 6~7-April-2009
  • Q1 who else should get involved?
  • Q2: how could we partition this year's discourse?
  • Q3: suggestions for developing a "Roadmap" as a key deliverable?
  • Q4: process suggestions?
  • Q5: any other suggestions?

5. New Issues:

6. Any Other Business:

7. Action items:

8. Schedule Next Meeting & Adjourn:

  • 15-Jan-2009 Launch Event - see: ConferenceCall_2009_01_15
  • Call adjourned at: 12:06 pm PST

--

notes taken by: Peter P. Yim / 2008.12.18-12:10 pm PST

All participants, please review and edit to enhance accuracy and granularity of the documented proceedings.

Transcript of the in-session chat input from the participants

Edited to provide better flow of the conversation only.

Peter P. Yim: Welcome to: OntologySummit2009 Planning Session - Thu 2008-12-18

Rex Brooks: One partition that I think would be helpful is a survey of existing ontological

representations of standards.

Mike Bennett: Do you mean industry messaging / data standards like XBRL?

Rex Brooks: Hi Mike. Yes.

Rex Brooks: XBRL is especially pertinent.

Rex Brooks: The OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee (SEE TC) released a

Pubic Review draft of its Reference Ontology for Service Oriented Architecture

recently. see: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200812/msg00001.html

Mike Bennett: An interesting challenge - many of the ones in my industry (financial) were developed

without defining a technology neutral business view of what they were trying to represent.

Rex Brooks: Exactly.

Peter Benson: If we are looking at standards we must be looking at conformance clauses and criteria

Rex Brooks: Indeed. Those may also vary with the representation, e.g. OWL, OWL-S. WSML etc.

Peter Benson: starting with defining what is and is not an ontology would be useful

Doug Holmes: Peter, a previous Ontology Summit has addressed the question you raised on "what is an ontology?";

the communique is at http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2007_Communique

Peter Benson: Thanks Doug, I took a look but could not find a definition.

Peter Benson: As in a definition we could add to an ISO standard

Doug Holmes: We more or less came to the same conclusion.

Mike Bennett: Indeed te communique says "The goal of the Ontology Summit is not to establish

a definitive definition of the word "ontology", which has proved extremely

challenging due to the diversity of artifacts it can refer to"

Peter Benson: hmm.. if we can not define it do we know what we are talking about?

Peter P. Yim: Q1: who else should get involved?

Peter Benson: NATO AC/135

Mike Bennett: UN/CEFACT

Peter P. Yim: BillMcCarthy is already on our organizing committee and will be our liaison to UN/CEFACT

Peter Benson: The chair of AC/135 is George Bond he is on our board - so yes I will be glad to contact him

Rex Brooks: We already have NCOR, but it would be good to have both Barry Smith and MarkMusen.

Peter P. Yim: Yes, we do have both of them (BarrySmith and MarkMusen) on the organizing committee already.

Doug Holmes: It seems to me that it would be good to have at least some representative

of the GIS community [e.g. GML]

Peter Benson: If you are looking for UN/CEFACT then you may want to ask TC 154

BillMcCarthy: I can talk to my co-convenor for the accounting interoperability summit Roger Debreceny

with the purpose of including XBRL

Mike Bennett: EDM Council of course

Peter Benson: TC 37 would be a natural as they deal with terminology

Doug Holmes: In the spirit of brainstorming, there are also some de-facto standards, such as

Dublin Core and FOAF that seem to be "ontological"

Trish Whetzel: SKOS is another

Peter P. Yim: Ed Dodds suggested XBRL and UDEF too

Mike Bennett: SUMO - IEEE

Doug Holmes: And, a number of architecture standards [e.g. FEAF, DODAF, etc.]

Trish Whetzel: Will the ISO groups by default bring in the grid folks, ie caGrid?

Ken Baclawski: As I mentioned in my introduction, I have been working with the CEA-2018 standard.

The standard is a general task planning standard which could have applications in

many domains, but was developed for consumer electronics. My contact with the

standards committee is Chuck Rich at WPI, and I will try to get him to participate.

Peter P. Yim: Q2: how could we partition this year's discourse? - i.e. framing the conversation

Mike Bennett: Ontology development methodologies

Peter Benson: Does this mean you are keeping "information" in the title?

Doug Holmes: 1. What is the role of an ontology in establishing a standard?

2. What kind of constraints or rules [standards?] should be applied to

ontologies that are used to establish a standard?

Kurt Conrad: Not clear on what you mean by "partition"

Peter Benson: The ISO definition of "data" is the representation of information -

Peter Benson: There are no "information standard" that I know of

Matthew West: Standards (amongst other things) provide definitions and authoritative sources for

identification of standard objects. Ontology is a natural next step for that,

whether the standards are information standards or not.

Standards themselves are information.

Mike Bennett: You might want to look at a breakdown of the different kind of animals that are

referred to as standards in different industries, for example some are message standards

(XML or otherwise), some are data models and so on. Should there be a partition on this?

Also some standards mandate business workflow and so on.

Ken Baclawski: A lot of standards are being expressed in XML Schema or RELAX NG.

CEA-2018 is expressed in RELAX NG. Are these already ontologies?

Peter Benson: I agree that ontologies could be the next step in the representation of information

hence my request for a definition of the term ontology as this may provide the

natural partition of the debate

Peter P. Yim: input from David Price: what are "today's" (as opposed to "next generation") standards,

and which parts of it lends to ontological representation with today's technology;

and which parts require research to bring us to the future.

David Leal: Standards that define a pipe thread or a material test method (two examples at random)

are currently expressed as text. We need to educate standardisation communities that

are not involved with IT about ontologies.

Rex Brooks: Earlier in the chat, I suggested: One partition that I think would be helpful is

a survey of existing ontological representations of standards.

I also cited: The OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee (SEE TC)

released a Public Review draft of its Reference Ontology for Service Oriented Architecture

recently. http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200812/msg00001.html

Peter Benson: computer processable standards?

Peter P. Yim: Q3: suggestions for developing a "Roadmap" as a key deliverable

David Leal: Peter - that what I was attempting to say, but most standardisation communities

do not know what is possible.

Matthew West: Web 1, Web 2, Web 3 history and predictions, provide a startpoint for a road map.

Peter Benson: Sounds like a previous Ontology Summit sought to addressed the question of what is

an ontology without coming up with a definitive answer, working towards defining classes

of ontologies would be useful

Rex Brooks: The Semantic Spectrum that Leo introduced several years ago is still viable as

a type of roadmap in the sense that we can compare where we are in terms of

expressivity versus how computable the otnological representations are.

Doug Holmes: Peter, I think if you qualify that as an "artifact for defining standards", it might

be a tractable goal

Mike Bennett: That suggests another stream which would be how to present ontology information in a

non IT format. Is that something that should be on the roadmap?

Peter Benson: He rest of the world is a pretty large audience, can we be a little bit more precise

Peter Benson: so explaining what an ontology is would be a good goal

Mike Bennett: One possible audience: those responsible for maintaining standards.

Specifically industry (content) standards where the business content is often

not captured because the technical people developing the standard are not strong

on requirements management.

Doug Holmes: Peter, I think explaining what an ontology is in the context of using it to define

a standard is a reasonable goal; if we don't constrain it like that, we'll just

repeat the 2007 experience...

Peter Benson: By that definition ISO 22745-30 is a specification of how to express an ontology in XML

Peter Benson: The ISO 13584 is developing ontoML

Peter Benson: The ISO 13584 team is developing ontoML

Peter Benson: Doug, I agree with you

Matthew West: We need to look at standards expressed as ontologies as well as standard ontologies.

David Leal: An area in which it would be good to have a success is LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) data.

There have been attempt to create an ontology corresponding to the standard ISO 14048.

The team at the EU JRC in Ispra would be interested.

BillMcCarthy: The Open-edi accounting and economic ontology (ISO/IEC 15944-4) is expressed in UML

Matthew West: What I mean is that we need to focus on standard expressed as ontologies rather

than standard ontologies or ontology languages.

Peter Benson: Is everything expressed in UML an ontology?

Peter P. Yim: Q4: process suggestions?

Peter Benson: if we are dealing with a large group trying to come to consensus a variation of

Robert's rules of order may work. The requirement that a motion must be put in

play tends to help focus the discussion

Peter P. Yim: input from Mark Musen: we should have the Communique pretty much into "final draft"

(if not already done) by the time we all walk into the face-to-face workshop

... we could use the F2F time more wisely

Peter P. Yim: we should get people to involve early .. and definitely to be cognizant that this

is a 3-month affair and NOT a 2-day conference

Fabian Neuhaus: I support Mark's point, during the last summit people who did not participate

until the face-to-face meeting made last minute requests for changes which

derailed the schedule for the Summit

Peter Benson: Inviting people who may not want to "participate" but may be willing to review

the output may be worth considering.

Ken Baclawski: Capturing the rationales for the parts of a communique would help prevent

participants from recapitulating the debate that resulted in the draft communique.

Peter Benson: It should be possible to create a "voting" comunity

Peter P. Yim: Q5: any other suggestions?

Mike Bennett: I think that if you want to have a clear message for industry standards owners,

there should be some consistent definition of what an ontology is, including some

consistent approach to what would be defined as good ontology for the content of

that standard.

Peter Benson: absolutely

Ken Baclawski: Have we started asking individuals to select roles in the summit planning,

organization and logistics?

Peter P. Yim: we'll be putting up the [ontology-summit] mailing list ... those who are involved

(or responded to) today's sesion will automatically be subscribed.

Doug Holmes: Adios

Peter P. Yim: Thanks everyone ... meeting adjourned 2008.12.18-12:06pm PST

- end of chat transcript -



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