Ontology Summit 2008 Communique Draft Review - "Repository Architecture" Breakout Group

Ref: OntologySummit2008_Communique/Draft

The Team:

• Michelle Raymond
• Ravi Sharma
• John F. Sowa
• Doug Holmes
• Mike Dean
• Peter P. Yim
• Leo Obrst
• Evan Wallace
• Thomas Brunner
• Faheem Aziz (Northrop Grumman)
• Luis Bermudez (SURA)
• BenjaminDai
• Todd Schneider

Notes

The Architecture of a repository for enabling wide-scale knowledge searching and sharing of ontologies, must be open and extensible. The Architecture design should be modular in nature and provide for ontology storing, sharing, searching, governance, and management of the repository infrastructure and content.

6.1 Architecture Approach

The core approach for the Open Ontology Repository is a federated architecture with the flavor of service oriented architectures. This approach provides for distributed ontology storage, repository management and service support.

The overall assessment of the community is to enable open, distributed, federated repositories, and to provide metadata for each ontology registered, as well as providing connections for logical services, inference engines etc.

Those who engage in the federation may include both open and closed content. All metadata required for sharing must be open. This metadata must include the access constraints.

Over the repository will be a upper ontology. The upper ontology is inclusive of both the Metadata of Ontologies and a Mapping Ontology.

6.2 Core Requirements

The requirements presented are important to the enablement of wide-scale knowledge re-use.

1. The repository architecture shall be scalable.

2. The architecture shall be optimized for sharing, collaboration and reuse.

3. The repository shall be capable of supporting ontologies in multiple formats and levels of formalism.

4. The repository architecture shall support distributed repositories.

5. The repository architecture shall support explicit machine usable/accessible formal semantics for the meta-model of the repository

6. The repository shall provide a mechanism to address intellectual property and related legal issues/problems

7. The repository architecture shall include a core set of services, such-as, support of adding ontologies, searching, and tie-in of data related to the stored ontologies.

8. The repository architecture shall support additional services both directly within the province of the repository and as external services.

9. The repository should support all phases of the ontology lifecycle.

6.3 Repository Management

Repository management has both required mechanisms for effective management and additonal management mechanisms that are highly recommended. The understanding is that as a repository and it's infrastructure evolve, more management support mechanisms will be included.

Required mangement mechanisms:

1. The repository shall provide a mechanism to enforce access policies

2. The repository shall provide a mechanism to enforce submission policies

3. The repository shall provide a mechanism to enforce governance policies

4. The repository shall provide a mechanism to enforce "tracking" policies

5. The repository shall provide a mechanism to maintain state change of repository items (i.e. versioning)

6. The repository shall provide a mechanism for user and administrator access control

Highly Recommended mechanisms:

1. The repository should provide a mechanism to create usage reports

2. The repository should provide syntax validation mechanisms

3. The repository should provide a logical consistency checking mechanism

4. The repository should provide a mechanism to automatically categorize a submission

6.4 Service and Application Support

The services and applications that should be supported include, but not limited to:

• Ontology Creation tools
• Ontology Editors
• Ontology Differencing tools
• Ontology modularization tools (clustering, etc.)
• Ontology Export
• Ontology Visualization (e.g., graph visualization)
• Version management
• Access control

6.5 Discovery Support

To facilitate knowledge discovery the repository shall provide metadata capabilities to support search capabilities, governance process, and management.

The repository should provide a content discovery mechanism that supports discovery by:

• domain
• author/creator/source
• version
• language
• terminology and controlled vocabularies
• quality
• mapping
• inference