OntologySummit2007

Ontology Summit 2007 - Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions

What's New

• community discussed Follow-up Plans and Actions during ConferenceCall_2007_06_07. (New section created (below))

• The OntologySummit2007_Communique has been adopted at the Summit and endorsed by over 50 individuals. While that document stays as a snapshot of what the summit conveners were at, continuing comments and suggestions are welcomed.

• See agenda, proceedings and pictures of the 23 & 24-Apr-2007 face-to-face meetings at:
  • 2007.04.23 Monday am (EDT) - workshop session-1: OntologySummit2007_Framework_Session
  • 2007.04.23 Monday pm (EDT) - workshop session-2: OntologySummit2007_Population_Session
  • 2007.04.24 Tuesday am (EDT) - workshop session-3: OntologySummit2007_Communique_Session
  • 2007.04.24 Tuesday pm (EDT) - summit symposium (session-4): OntologySummit2007_Symposium ... audio archive of this session is available now!

• Conveners & editors efforts to synthesize the conversation - see:
  • OntologySummit2007_Communique
  • OntologySummit2007_FrameworksForConsideration
  • OntologySummit2007_Survey
  • OntologySummit2007_Process
  • OntologySummit2007_DefinitionsOfOntology
  • OntologySummit2007_FormalOntology perspectives ... (deferred)

Objective

Building upon the successful model of last year's UpperOntologySummit, co-sponsors from NIST, Ontolog, NCOR, NCBO, NLM/NIH, W3C, Tag Commons, Stanford-KSL and others (see: list of co-sponsors) are initiating a second summit during the spring of 2007.

We are hoping to convene key players in both research and applications who profess in developing or facilitating the evolution of "ontologies" and structures that help model semantics, to join us in our Ontology Summit 2007 activity to help everyone understand the distinctions between Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy and all the terms in between that various communities employ to label those "ontologies" or "structures."

The challenge, this year, put before the various constituencies and communities involved, is to clarify what everyone means when they use the term "ontology" or when they refer to these semantic structures. Our objective is to define and agree to a systematic means of categorizing the many kinds of things that fall broadly within the "ontology" spectrum. By doing so, the research, development and Internet communities would have a better way of comparing, combining and mapping ontologies to one another (apples to apples). The range of what people call "ontologies" covers folksonomies, taxonomies, thesauri, conceptual models, and formal logic-based models to name just a few flavors.

The Ontolog Forum plans to initiate a vigorous three-month online discourse on the subject matter, and hopefully come up with promising strawman structures to characterize all of these possibilities, and more. This online discourse will culminate in a two-day face-to-face workshop and symposium during NIST's Interoperability Week 2007 on 23 & 24-April-2007.

Similar to last year's summit, our intent is that the conveners of "Ontology Summit 2007" will release a written communiqué to the international press, laying out the final categorization structure and locating some key ontological artifacts within it as one of the deliverables from this initiative.

The Team

• Organizing Committee:
  • Olivier Bodenreider (NLM, NIH)
  • Tom Gruber (TagCommons)
  • Nicola Guarino (LOA-CNR.IT)
  • Ivan Herman (W3C)
  • DeborahMcGuinness (Stanford KSL)
  • Mark Musen (NCOR, NCBO, Stanford SMI)
  • Leo Obrst (Ontolog, MITRE)
  • Frank Olken (NSF)
  • Steve Ray (NIST)
  • Barry Smith (NCOR, SUNY-Buffalo)
  • Chris Welty (IBM Research)
  • Peter P. Yim (Ontolog, CIM3)

• Co-Sponsors: ('Co-sponsors' are organizations who are providing technical or funding support, and/or endorsing the purpose (i.e. the objective) of this Ontology Summit)
  • Accuracy&Aesthetics (DeborahMacPherson)
  • The Applied Ontology journal (NicolaGuarino & MarkMusen)
  • The Boeing Company (MichaelUschold)
  • Bremen Ontology Research Group at Bremen University, supported by the faculties of Informatics and Linguistics and the Collaborative Research Center for Spatial Cognition (JohnBateman / TillMossakowski)
  • Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo (BarrySmith)
  • CNR Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Laboratory of Applied Ontology (Trento & Rome) (NicolaGuarino & AldoGangemi)
  • EPISTLE - European Process Industries STEP Technical Liaison Executive, the consortium responsible for the development of ISO 15926 (MatthewWest)
  • Conmergence (EdDodds)
  • CIM3 (PeterYim)
  • Cycorp (DougLenat)
  • Essential Strategies (DavidHay)
  • Humanmarkup.org (RexBrooks)
  • IBM Research (ChrisWelty)
  • Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) (PatHayes)
  • Indian Statistical Institute (NabonitaGuha)
  • InfoCloud Solutions (ThomasVanderWal)
  • ISO TC 184 SC 4 JWG8 - the ISO working group that developed the ISO 18629 Process Specification Language (PSL) standard (MichaelGruninger)
  • ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 N 1498 - ISO 24707 Common Logic (CL) Working Group (HarryDelugach (editor), Pat Hayes, Chris Menzel, John F. Sowa, MurrayAltheim, Elisa Kendall, et al.)
  • Java Professionals (DougHolmes)
  • Mathet Consulting (MatthewHettinger)
  • The Department of Accounting and Information Systems, Michigan State University (BillMcCarthy)
  • MITRE (LeoObrst, PatCassidy)
  • NCBO - The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (MarkMusen)
  • NCOR - (US) National Center for Ontological Research (BarrySmith & MarkMusen)
  • The NeOn project (AldoGangemi & EnricoMotta)
  • NIST - (US) National Institute of Standards and Technology (SteveRay, Alan Bond, et al.)
  • NLM, NIH - (US) National Library of Medicine of the National Institute of Health (OlivierBodenreider)
  • The College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University (LarryFinkelstein, KenBaclawski)
  • OASIS Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) TC (CarlMattocks)
  • OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC (JonBosak & TimMcGrath)
  • Ontolog (PeterYim / Leo Obrst / KurtConrad)
  • Ontology Works (BillAndersen)
  • Pensive.eu (PeterBrown)
  • Project10X (MillsDavis)
  • Semantic Arts (DaveMcComb)
  • Shell International Petroleum (MatthewWest)
  • Chair of System Integration and Management, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (SIM, MIPT) (LeonidOtotsky)
  • Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI) (MarkMusen)
  • Stanford Knowledge Systems, AI Laboratory (KSL) (DeborahMcGuinness)
  • Tag Commons (TomGruber)
  • Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University (ChrisMenzel)
  • Tall Tree Labs (BobSmith)
  • UCLA (AlanBond)
  • Universidad Distrital (JorgeEnriqueSabyBeltran)
  • University of Toronto (MichaelGruninger)
  • Virginia Modeling Analysis and Simulation Center (CharlesTurnitsa)
  • VivoMind Intelligence (JohnSowa)
  • W3C (IvanHerman & Ian Jacobs)
  • www.content-wire.com (PaolaDiMaio)

• Conveners:
  • these are key participants who provided substantive contribution to the Ontology Summit 2007 initiative through:
    • the online discourse,
    • the survey and subsequent synthesis work,
    • authoring/presentation of various relevant positions and perspectives (for this Summit),
    • preparing the drafts of the "Framework" and "Communiqué" (which were then collaboratively reviewed and adopted during the face-to-face meetings),
  • participants at the face-to-face meetings (either on-site or remotely), and
  • all members of the organizing committee
  • to these conveners, who made this initiative a reality, we express our deepest appreciation and gratitude.

You are cordially invited to join us!

(This section is left here for archival purposes only, as the Summit has already successfully concluded)

• Like all activities Ontolog has been hosting, this is open to everyone.
  • Do join us if you concur with the objective of this endeavor and would like to participate in, or follow the progress of the discourse

• specific individuals who may be interested include (but not limit to):
  • upper ontology researchers and developers
  • domain ontology researchers and developers
  • ontology-based application developers and implementors
  • active players in the ontology community
  • potential user organizations
  • potential funders of ontology and ontological engineering work
  • representatives from International Standards Bodies
  • thought leaders and active contributors of the web 2.0 community
  • leaders of the semantic web community
  • people in academia, research, industry and the web working on sharing knowledge, semantic interoperability, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence ... who are engaged in the research, development, engineering and implementation of these subject matters

Discussion Archives & Shared-File Workspace

• Collection of Resources and Collaboratively Authored Document draft workspace on this wiki:
  • OntologySummit2007_DefinitionsOfOntology
  • OntologySummit2007_FrameworksForConsideration
  • OntologySummit2007_Process
  • OntologySummit2007_Survey
  • OntologySummit2007_IssuesAndCandidateResolutions
  • OntologySummit2007_Communique

Follow-up Plans and Actions (Tasks) - see: OntologySummit2007_FollowUp

• Michael Grüninger will lead the authorship of a paper, reporting on the Proceedings, the Communiqué, and other aspects of the Summit, that will be submitted to the "Applied Ontology" journal for publication.

• Tom Gruber initialized a community effort to distinguishing properties of ontologies
  • Tom will champion the consolidation of our community's contributions, and will push that to wikipedia, so it may reach a even broader audience.

• Ken Baclawski will head up an effort to 'populate' the 'framework' with artifacts contributed by the various constituencies during the survey. He will be soliciting and coordinating additional contribution from the community - in terms of providing and populating the framework with exemplary artifacts, and in validating the measures and evaluation of the population exercises.

• Strong suggestions that there is a need for ongoing research and development work to further refine the 'framework' and its associated metric, to culminate in an academic/research paper (originally brought up by OlivierBodenreider).
  • While further organization of the effort is in order, the following people have indicated interest to pursue it: Michael Grüninger, Leo Obrst, Tom Gruber, DeborahMcGuinness, Ken Baclawski, Olivier Bodenreider (review role only), Peter P. Yim, Chuck Turnitsa, ... (add you name here if you are interested)

• Susan Turnbull featured the "community process" of this Summit on the Tue 2007.07.17 Collaborative Expedition Workshop (CEW#63 to be held at NSF, Arlington, VA, USA) as part of her exposition into the process, dynamics, potential and realities of a few of the exemplary virtual communities during that one-day workshop.
  • Peter P. Yim was the liaison and helped put together the panel for that event.
  • see details at: OntologySummit2007_FollowUp/CewPanel

• ref: discussion at the community member ConferenceCall_2007_06_07

Conference Call, Meeting & Workshop

Ontology Summit 2007 face-to-face Sessions

• 23~24-April-2007 (Monday & Tuesday)
  • as part of NIST's Interoperability Week 2007 (scheduled for the week of April 23, 2007)
  • at the NIST campus, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
  • 3 technical workshops and an open public symposium
    • 2007.04.23 Monday am: "The Framework" (agreeing to a framework and set of dimensions) - Co-chairs: Leo Obrst / Michael Grüninger - see: OntologySummit2007_Framework_Session
    • 2007.04.23 Monday pm: "Populating the Framework" (fitting artifacts into the "framework") - Chair: Tom Gruber - see: OntologySummit2007_Population_Session
    • (Tuesday early am: NIST Interoperability Week Plenary) - everyone goes to this
    • 2007.04.24 Tuesday am: Finalizing the Communiqué - Co-chairs: Olivier Bodenreider / Frank Olken - see: OntologySummit2007_Communique_Session
    • 2007.04.24 Tuesday pm: The Symposium (public meeting) - Co-chairs: Steve Ray / DeborahMcGuinness - see: OntologySummit2007_Symposium
      • Keynote: Tom Gruber

Open / Convener Sessions

• Follow-up activity - Ontology Summit 2007
• a regular conference call with a focus on follow-up actions - ConferenceCall_2007_06_07
• some review and follow-up planning (post summit F2F meetings) - ConferenceCall_2007_05_03
• final convener sync-up (pre- summit F2F meetings) - ConferenceCall_2007_04_19
• Some discussion on input/content syntheses during the Ontolog member ConferenceCall_2007_04_05
• Some discussion of the plans and progress during the Ontolog member ConferenceCall_2007_03_22
• Some discussion of the process during the Ontolog member ConferenceCall_2007_03_15
• Session to coordinate the synthesis of the Ontology Summit 2007 virtual discourse, and the reduction of that to writing - ConferenceCall_2007_02_15
• Ontology Summit 2007 Launch Event - ConferenceCall_2007_01_18

Organizing Committee Sessions

• Tue 2007.05.01 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_05_01 - postmortem & follow-up planning
• Tue 2007.04.17 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_04_17 - final organizing committee sync-up (prior to the summit F2F meetings)
• Tue 2007.04.10 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_04_10
• Tue 2007.04.03 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_04_03
• Tue 2007.03.27 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_03_27
• Tue 2007.03.20 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_03_20
• Tue 2007.03.13 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_03_13
• Tue 2007.03.06 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_03_06
• Tue 2007.02.27 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_02_27
• Tue 2007.02.20 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_02_20
• Thu 2007.02.15 active conveners and editors' coordination call - ConferenceCall_2007_02_15
• Tue 2007.02.13 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_02_13
• Tue 2007.02.06 committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_02_06
• Tue 2007.01.30 (v1.1, continuation) first committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_01_30
• Fri 2007.01.26 first full committee conference call - OntologySummit2007/OrganizingCommitteeMeeting_2007_01_26
• Fri 2007.01.19 follow-up session
• Fri 2007.01.12 follow-up session
• Fri 2007.01.05 follow-up session
• Mon 2006.12.18 initial prep session - ConferenceCall_2006_12_18

Additional Resources

• other NIST Interoperability Week (April 23~25, 2007) Events - http://www.mel.nist.gov/div826/msid/sima/interopweek/meetings.htm

• Noteworthy Ontolog Past Events -

• Consider joining the Ontolog community, see Membership information

Ontology Summit 2007 in the News, Blogosphere & Literature

• "An Intrepid Guide to Ontologies" - Michael K. Bergman, 2007.05.16

• "Ontology Summit 2007 Communiqué version 1.0.0 / 2007.04.24" - Ed Dodds, Commergence, 2007.05.01

• "You got your folksonomy in my ontology!" - Joab Jackson, Government Computer News, 2007.04.27

• "Sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication" - Vincent Reboul, Bulletins Electroniques, 2007.04.27 (in French)

• "A Reference Model for Ontology?" (2007.04.24) and "Ontology Summit 2007" (2007.04.17) - Peter Brown, Pensive.eu

• "Ontolog Drawings and Science Maps" - DeborahMacPherson, Accuracy & Aesthetics, 2007.04.23

• "Ontology Summit 2007: Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksomony Distinctions" - Robert David Steele, Citizens Party, 2007.03.17