ConferenceCall 2008 12 18

= OntologySummit2009 Planning Session - Thu 2008-12-18 =


 * Subject: Ontologies as the Next Generation of Information Standards
 * Co-chair: SteveRay & PeterYim
 * Agenda: This is a communitywide brainstorming and planning session for OntologySummit2009.


 * Archives:
 * transcript of the online chat during the panel discussion

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
 * see world clock for other time zones
 * Expected Call Duration: ~1.5 hours
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 * Discussions and Q & A:
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 * thanks to the soaphub.org folks, one can now use a jabber/xmpp client (e.g. gtalk) to join this chatroom. Just add the room as a buddy - (in our case here) ontolog_20081218@soaphub.org ... Handy for mobile devices!


 * For those who cannot join us, or who have further questions or remarks on the topic, please post them to the [ontology-forum] listserv so that everyone in the community can benefit from the discourse.


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 * This session, like all other Ontolog events, is open to the public. Information relating to this session is shared on this wiki page: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_12_18


 * Please note that this session will be recorded, and the audio archive is expected to be made available as open content to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.

Attendees

 * Attended:
 * SteveRay (chair)
 * PeterYim (co-chair)
 * LeoObrst
 * KurtConrad
 * RobinBenjamins
 * LaurentLiscia
 * BillMcCarthy
 * TrishWhetzel
 * NilsSandsmark
 * DavidPrice
 * FabianNeuhaus
 * PeterBenson
 * RexBrooks
 * DavidLeal
 * KenBaclawski
 * DougHolmes
 * MikeBennett
 * NancyWiegand
 * MatthewWest
 * RaviSharma


 * Expecting:
 * Simon Frechette (NIST)
 * BarrySmith
 * GaryBergCross (will join late)
 * AsmaMinyaoui
 * HensonGraves
 * JamieClark
 * (please add yourself to the list if you are a member or rsvp to  with your name and affiliation.)
 * (please add yourself to the list if you are a member or rsvp to  with your name and affiliation.)


 * Regrets:
 * ElisaKendall
 * MikeDean
 * EvanWallace
 * MarkMusen
 * PeterBrown
 * AlanRuttenberg
 * PatHayes
 * NicolaGuarino

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



Agenda & Proceedings
1. Meeting called to order:


 * SteveRay & PeterYim took the chair and welcomed everyone


 * PeterYim volunteered to take minutes of the meeting


 * review and adopt agenda

2. Roll Call:


 * see above

3. Discussions:


 * Ontology Summits - Overview and what has come before - using the chat


 * the theme this year
 * see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2009#nid1Q2F


 * 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: PeterYim / 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.

PeterYim: Welcome to: OntologySummit2009 Planning Session - Thu 2008-12-18

RexBrooks: One partition that I think would be helpful is a survey of existing ontological representations of standards.

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

RexBrooks: Hi Mike. Yes.

RexBrooks: XBRL is especially pertinent.

RexBrooks: 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

MikeBennett: 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.

RexBrooks: Exactly.

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

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

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

DougHolmes: 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

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

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

DougHolmes: We more or less came to the same conclusion.

MikeBennett: 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"

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

PeterYim: Q1: who else should get involved?

PeterBenson: NATO AC/135

MikeBennett: UN/CEFACT

PeterYim: BillMcCarthy is already on our organizing committee and will be our liaison to UN/CEFACT

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

RexBrooks: We already have NCOR, but it would be good to have both BarrySmith and MarkMusen.

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

DougHolmes: It seems to me that it would be good to have at least some representative of the GIS community [e.g. GML]

PeterBenson: 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

MikeBennett: EDM Council of course

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

DougHolmes: In the spirit of brainstorming, there are also some de-facto standards, such as Dublin Core and FOAF that seem to be "ontological"

TrishWhetzel: SKOS is another

PeterYim: EdDodds suggested XBRL and UDEF too

MikeBennett: SUMO - IEEE

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

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

KenBaclawski: 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.

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

MikeBennett: Ontology development methodologies

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

DougHolmes: 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?

KurtConrad: Not clear on what you mean by "partition"

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

PeterBenson: There are no "information standard" that I know of

MatthewWest: 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.

MikeBennett: 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.

KenBaclawski: A lot of standards are being expressed in XML Schema or RELAX NG. CEA-2018 is expressed in RELAX NG. Are these already ontologies?

PeterBenson: 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

PeterYim: input from DavidPrice: 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.

DavidLeal: 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.

RexBrooks: 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

PeterBenson: computer processable standards?

PeterYim: Q3: suggestions for developing a "Roadmap" as a key deliverable

DavidLeal: Peter - that what I was attempting to say, but most standardisation communities do not know what is possible.

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

PeterBenson: 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

RexBrooks: 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.

DougHolmes: Peter, I think if you qualify that as an "artifact for defining standards", it might be a tractable goal

MikeBennett: 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?

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

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

MikeBennett: 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.

DougHolmes: 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...

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

PeterBenson: The ISO 13584 is developing ontoML

PeterBenson: The ISO 13584 team is developing ontoML

PeterBenson: Doug, I agree with you

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

DavidLeal: 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

MatthewWest: What I mean is that we need to focus on standard expressed as ontologies rather than standard ontologies or ontology languages.

PeterBenson: Is everything expressed in UML an ontology?

PeterYim: Q4: process suggestions?

PeterBenson: 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

PeterYim: input from MarkMusen: 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

PeterYim: 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

FabianNeuhaus: 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

PeterBenson: Inviting people who may not want to "participate" but may be willing to review the output may be worth considering.

KenBaclawski: Capturing the rationales for the parts of a communique would help prevent participants from recapitulating the debate that resulted in the draft communique.

PeterBenson: It should be possible to create a "voting" comunity

PeterYim: Q5: any other suggestions?

MikeBennett: 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.

PeterBenson: absolutely

KenBaclawski: Have we started asking individuals to select roles in the summit planning, organization and logistics?

PeterYim: we'll be putting up the [ontology-summit] mailing list ... those who are involved (or responded to) today's sesion will automatically be subscribed.

DougHolmes: Adios

PeterYim: Thanks everyone ... meeting adjourned 2008.12.18-12:06pm PST

- end of chat transcript -