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Ontolog Forum

Exploring Joint EarthCube-Ontolog Activities - Thu 2012_06_21

Suggestions have been received from various individuals who straddle both the Earth Cube community and the Ontolog community to prompt us to call this meeting. We have invited some of those people to this meeting with an aim to explore the possibility of a Joint EarthCube-Ontolog mini-series of virtual sessions (or possibly even other related activities.) We will try to find out who can help organize these activities, who else should we enlist. Most importantly, we will try to align objectives, goals and expectations of those who are involved.

Topic: "Planning a mini-series at the Ontolog Forum on Earth Cube related topics"

Session Co-chairs: LeoObrst (Ontolog; MITRE) & KrishnaSinha (EarthCube; Virginia Tech)

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, 21-Jun-2012
  • Start Time: 9:30am PDT / 12:30am EDT / 16:30 UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: 1.0~1.5 hours
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Attendees

  • Expecting:

Agenda Ideas

please insert any additional items below (along with your name for follow-up purposes)

  • discussion: Is an Ontolog Forum styled "mini-series" the right vehicle?
  • what are the goals, objectives, expectations?
  • who can help organize? what? ... who else?
  • when?
  • what comes next?
  • ...

Agenda & Proceedings

Archives:

1. Meeting called to order:

2. Roll Call:

  • see above
  • welcome and quick self-intro

3. Key items for review and discussion today:

  • Chairs openings - Leo & Krishna
  • discussion: Is an Ontolog Forum styled "mini-series" the right vehicle?
  • what are the goals, objectives, expectations?
  • who can help organize? what? ... who else?
  • when?
  • what comes next?

4. Action Plans:

5. Schedule Next Meeting & Adjourn:

  • Next Meetings:
    • we will continue the planning work on the [mini-series-org] mailing list
    • reserving the Thu 2012.08.09 date for the first Joint EarthCube-Ontolog mini-series session - topic for this virtual session will be: "Value Proposition of Ontology and Semantic Technology for the Earth Science Community"
  • Call adjourned at: 10:38 am PDT

IM Chat Transcript captured during the session

see raw transcript here.

(for better clarity, the version below is a re-organized and lightly edited chat-transcript.)

Participants are welcome to make light edits to their own contributions as they see fit.

-- begin in-session chat-transcript --

[09:30] Peter P. Yim: Peter P. Yim: Welcome to the

Planning a mini-series at the Ontolog Forum on Earth Cube related topics

Date/Time: Thu 2012.06.21 - starting 12:30pm EDT / 9:30am PDT Duration: a 1.0 to 1.5-hour telecon

Dial-in: Phone (US): +1 (206) 402-0100 ... PIN: 141184# Skype: joinconference ... PIN: 141184# (for

Skype users: the Skype Dial pad can be found under the "Call" dropdown menu as "Show Dial pad")

session page: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2012_06_21

Attendees: Leo Obrst (co-chair), Krishna Sinha (co-chair), GaryBergCross, Pascal Hitzler,

Krzysztof Janowicz, Naicong Li, Dalia Varanka & Peter P. Yim (scribe).

Regrets: Nancy Wiegand, Mike Dean, Mark Schildhauer

Proceedings:

anonymous morphed into Pascal Hitzler

anonymous morphed into Naicong Li

anonymous morphed into Krzysztof Janowicz

GaryBergCross: For the record, I proposed a mini series in email to Peter.

Pascal Hitzler: Let me ask some simple questions - sorry for not being on the page. What does ontolog

usually do? What are the people usually reached through ontolog?

Peter P. Yim: @PascalHitzler & All - ONTOLOG in one slide - see:

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/presentation/ONTOLOG-intro--PeterYim-LeoObrst-KurtConrad_Oct-2008.pdf

Pascal Hitzler: thanks a lot, I'm getting a picture now. I have no idea how I missed this so far

Apologies for holding up the discussion ...

GaryBergCross: I think that we should have a mini series (4-5 sessions) like you did for SemanticWiki

from Nov 2011 to March 2012.

Krishna Sinha: Semantics should make it very easy to share data so that downstream activities are

easy to implement

GaryBergCross: I would go beyond Krishna Sinha 2 areas or say that they can be addressed within a

series that includes a discussion of issues such as methodologies that would provide benefits.

Pascal Hitzler and KrzysztofJanowicz's recent posting addresses some of the issues.

GaryBergCross: One thing that raised this idea was what we captured in the "manifesto" - enough

Earth Cube people misunderstood what semantics is, that we need time to explicate it and this takes

more time than the Charrette allowed.

Pascal Hitzler: So for a joint activity, the key question to ask first is, perhaps, what is the

target group?

Pascal Hitzler: Perhaps EarthCube'rs who are looking for further insights into semantic technologies?

Pascal Hitzler: So we would be looking at a set of tutorials?

GaryBergCross: An example of what we didn't have adequate time to discuss at the Charrette were such

things as what it takes to develop an adequate vocabulary for a domain science. We could have a 2

hour virtual session on this, perhaps a panel of 2-3 people giving examples of their work followed

by discussion.

GaryBergCross: Pascal Hitzler see something like

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2009_03_05 as an example.

Naicong Li: One of the Earth Cube initiatives is to facilitate sharing of resources such as data,

models and tools. Ontologies can help address the need of resource organization, discovery and

access, interoperability among the resources. This could be one of the themes in the mini series.

GaryBergCross: We might combine Naicong's suggestion with an interoperability topic.

GaryBergCross: Two goals I would suggest for the series is to clarify the issues and help formulate

early steps to help manage overall risk.

GaryBergCross: Another goal that I was thinking of was to EXPAND the community of semantic

researchers/ontologists that participate in the EC discussion.

Krishna Sinha: how much of the IBM Watson's capability was semantically enabled? ... maybe we can

leverage on some label like "Geo Watson"

Pascal Hitzler: concerning "geo-watson" - we discussed this in

http://knoesis.wright.edu/faculty/PascalHitzler/pub/DEKE.pdf

Pascal Hitzler: The Digital Earth as Knowledge Engine. Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler Semantic

Web journal. To appear.

Krzysztof Janowicz: I agree that Geo-Watson is an analogy

Krzysztof Janowicz: There are good reasons not to use it

GaryBergCross: Geo-watson is OK for some big vision, but I prefer balancing it with a firm base that

would afford progress towards the vision.

Pascal Hitzler: the danger of using the phrase "geo-watson" is that it may hype expectations

Krzysztof Janowicz: we should use the term knowledge engine, not "watson"

GaryBergCross: For starting we need to consider use cases and maybe a Geo-Watson gets folded into

that session.

Krzysztof Janowicz: (we also talk here about a geo-watson: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~KrzysztofJanowicz/RESTfulSOS.pdf in 2011)

GaryBergCross: I would contrast the general use of speech recognition, which we can leverage, with

Earth Science Domain vocabulary development such as assisted by text mining...Need the vocabularies

first...concentrate there.

Krishna Sinha: identify semantic capabilities for geoscientists

Krzysztof Janowicz: WE have exactly this

Krzysztof Janowicz: http://earthcube.ning.com/profiles/blogs/semantics-and-ontologies-in-earthcube

Pascal Hitzler: The "Elevator Talk" post:

http://earthcube.ning.com/group/semantics-and-ontologies/forum/topics/key-ingredients-for-your-next-semantics-elevator-talk?xg_source=activity

- see also

http://knoesis.wright.edu/faculty/PascalHitzler/pub/elevator12.pdf for direct link

Pascal Hitzler: Agree with Krzysztof: A first session about the value proposition makes a lot of sense.

Pascal Hitzler: Perhaps follow-up could then discuss how to "get there" - i.e. towards a *technical* roadmap.

Krzysztof Janowicz: yes

Krzysztof Janowicz: [consensus] First session August 9th, 2012 on the value proposition of semantics for

the Earth Cube community (highlighting the immediate added value without technical detail or technical language)

Peter P. Yim: [decision] the 8 of us at this call, plus Nancy Wiegand, Mike Dean and Mark Schildhauer, will

form the organizing committee for this upcoming mini-series

Peter P. Yim: [action-Peter] Peter to start a mailing list, and a mini-series "home page" on the wiki for this effort

Peter P. Yim: [action-All] we will continue the planning work on the mailing list and wiki

Peter P. Yim: -- session ended: 10:38am PDT --

-- end of in-session chat-transcript --

  • Further Planning - please post them to the [ mini-series-org ] listserv with an appropriate "subject line."

Additional Resources

--

notes taken by: Peter P. Yim / 2012.06.21 (updated: ppy/2012.07.03)

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