OOR/ConferenceCall 2012 08 21

= OpenOntologyRepository: "OOR Funding" Workshop-II - Tue 2012_08_21 =

Topic: "Rethinking our Funding Strategy" - Brainstorm Session

Session Chair: KenBaclawski (Northeastern University)

Archives:


 * Abstract
 * Agenda
 *  Prepared slides
 * Audio recording of the session ... [ 1:29:29 ; mp3 ; 10.24 MB ]
 * transcript of the online chat during the session
 * Resources

Conference Call Details:

 * Date: Tuesday, 21-Aug-2012
 * Start Time: 8:30am PDT / 11:30am EDT / 5:30pm CEST / 15:30 UTC
 * ref: World Clock
 * Expected Call Duration: ~1.5 hours


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Attendees

 * Attended:
 * KenBaclawski (chair)
 * PeterYim (scribe)
 * TerryLongstreth
 * MikeDean
 * MichaelGruninger
 * BobSmith
 * MikeBennett
 * ShannonCopeland
 * ToddSchneider


 * Expecting:
 * ... if you are coming to the meeting, please add your name above (plus your affiliation, if you aren't already a member of the community) above, or e-mail  so that we can reserve enough resources to support everyone's participation. ...
 * ... if you are coming to the meeting, please add your name above (plus your affiliation, if you aren't already a member of the community) above, or e-mail  so that we can reserve enough resources to support everyone's participation. ...


 * Regrets:

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



Abstract
Topic: "Rethinking our Funding Strategy" - Brainstorm Session

While the core OOR team has kept the momentum on the Open Ontology Repository Initiative going ever since it begun in early 2008 (Big THANKS, Everyone!), the overall OOR initiative, has not had any funding even up to now, and had relied totally on volunteered effort. The progress on OOR could have been more expedient and predictable, if the entire initiative, and some of the core work, has some sort of funding to allow it to engage resources for getting things done when needed.

This is a renewed effort on getting OOR funded. KenBaclawski, who co-lead an earlier proposal effort (our response to NSF solicitation 07-601) will continue to provide leadership and help facilitate the process.

We will use this workshop to strategize and brainstorm on how we should approach this very important question going forward. We will not confine ourselves to seeking research grants (as we had, predominantly, before) but will try to look at any and all opportunity or possibility that would help fund and make the OOR Initiative deliver the mission it had set out to accomplish.

The plan for this session is to use the time of this session as fairly open discussion on the issue. There will not be formal presentations. The chair will try to help focus our discussion.

Resources:

 * The OpenOntologyRepository Initiative - http://www.oor.net
 * Index page to the various OOR instances - http://oor.net


 * Earlier OOR Funding efforts
 * response to solicitation - nsf07601 & nsf-08575
 * OpenOntologyRepository_Proposal/Nsf_07601 ... (open)
 * http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/ ... (proposal team-only)
 * http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/community/project/OOR/nsf07601/ ... (proposal team-only)
 * response to solicitation nsf08575 - http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OOR/ConferenceCall_2008_11_14#nid1OLT
 * we ended up not responding to this (with either a "large" or a "small" proposals)

Agenda
Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call


 * 1. Opening - chair ... [ slides ]
 * 2. Framing the issues - chair
 * 3. Q & A and open discussion [ All ]
 * 4. Summary / Next steps / Announcements - (chair)

Proceedings:
Please refer to the above

IM Chat Transcript captured during the session:

(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 --

[08:25] PeterYim: Welcome to the

= "OOR Funding" Workshop-II - Tue 2012_08_21 =

Topic: "Rethinking our Funding Strategy" - Brainstorm Session

Session Chair: KenBaclawski (Northeastern University)

Session page: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OOR/ConferenceCall_2012_08_21

Mute control: *7 to un-mute ... *6 to mute

Can't find Skype Dial pad? (as a Dial pad seems to be missing on Linux-based Skype v4.x for skype-calls.)
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Attendees: KenBaclawski (chair), BobSmith, MichaelGruninger, MikeBennett, MikeDean, PeterYim (scribe), ShannonCopeland, TerryLongstreth, ToddSchneider

Proceedings:
[08:25] PeterYim: Hi Terry!

[08:27] TerryLongstreth: Hi Peter. Don't know what I can contribute today, but I'm curious.

[08:33] anonymous morphed into ShannonCopeland

[08:34] BobSmith : Hi Shannon

[08:35] MikeBennett: Hi Shannon, glad you could make it.

[08:35] PeterYim: -- session started: 8:35am PDT --

[08:36] PeterYim: == KenBaclawski starts with the slides

[08:38] PeterYim: slides are at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/OOR-Funding/2012-08-21_OOR-Funding-II/OOR-funding-workshop--KenBaclawski_20120821.pdf

[08:50] PeterYim: see a listing of the various OOR instances, and who's on the OOR.NET network, at: http://oor.net/index1.html

[08:58] PeterYim: == open discussion begins ...

[08:59] TerryLongstreth: Project Goals (Larger scope) : 1-Show capability for fostering reuse of cataloged concepts 2-Show methodology for fusing conceptual models (i.e. Ontology interoperability - OntoIOp) and managing the evolution of fused models 3-Demonstrate feasibility of managing heterogeneous concept description languages

Unsaid - a fused ontology, derived from heterogeneous sources is (cheaper, faster, better) solution than inventing new ontology 'by hand'

[09:11] TerryLongstreth: Business Case: Value Proposition - Advantages of an OOR for management of concept relationships across a specific application domain Resource requirements / Costs Schedule - Define business entity to manage work (foundation/consortium) - Define transition from development to Ontology management role - Different from open source software - the goal is to have a sharable, manageable, evolvable knowledge base, in perpetuity. - as concepts evolve, users are impacted

[09:23] BobSmith : An OASIS TC has recently developed a White Paper that relates to Terry's Management point - Transforming Government Framework (TGF) and a Pattern Language for implementing that Framework. http://www.PeterFBrown.com summarizes the business case for TGF.

[09:24] BobSmith : http://docs.oasis-open.org/tgf/TGF-Primer/v1.0/cn01/TGF-Primer-v1.0-cn01.pdf

[09:22] ToddSchneider: Terry, go you explain your point about 'management' further?

[09:27] ToddSchneider: We should distinguish between operating an instance of OOR and 'active' management of the content residing in an instance.

[09:10] PeterYim: role models: Apache Foundation; Linux;

[09:11] PeterYim: my opinion, ideally: A Foundation with an endowment would be a great model to pursue

[09:12] ToddSchneider: What organization funded the Semantic Media Wiki work?

[09:13] ToddSchneider: Vulcan, wasn't it?

[09:13] MikeDean: Todd: yes

[09:16] ToddSchneider: So would Vulcan be an option? I don't anything about them.

[09:13] MikeBennett / PeterYim: EDMCouncil, OMG, OASIS ... all work on a "Membership" model, where they get their operating funding from member subscription fees

[09:18] MikeBennett: see: http://edmcouncil.org - is a 501(c)(6) "business league" organization

[09:18] MikeDean: EDM Council is a 501(c)(6) Business League - see irs.gov link - http://www.irs.gov/charities/nonprofits/article/0,,id=96107,00.html

[09:17] BobSmith : Ken - Looking at your Ontologies for Bioinformatics book - and the strong focus on Bayesian Web - Maybe EDM - MikeBennett might find strong interest in a mutual project??

[09:23] MikeBennett: @Bob - indeed. We would love to work with others. In addition to the model I described above, we are also seeking funding for those things that we can't simply do with staff member + members' voluntary effort. Ontology integration and common reuse of standards semantics is high on our agenda for this.

[09:18] ShannonCopeland: Please see below the Overview of Red Hat's "mission" http://www.redhat.com which is a commercial organization that organizes and delivers open source technology to businesses worldwide:

[09:18] ShannonCopeland: OVERVIEW

Red Hat is a global leader in providing open source software technologies to enterprise customers. These offerings include our core enterprise operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our enterprise middleware platform, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, as well as our virtualization, cloud, and storage offerings and other Red Hat enterprise technologies. Our development and licensing model We employ an open source software development and licensing model that uses the collaborative input of a worldwide community of contributors to develop and enhance software. We actively participate in this community-oriented development process, often in a leadership role, and leverage it to create our Red Hat- and JBoss-branded enterprise technologies. We believe that the open source development and licensing model offers advantages for Red Hat and our customers over proprietary software development and licensing models. Through the open source development model, we leverage a global community of developers and users, whose collective resources and knowledge supplement the developers we employ. As a result, we believe we are able to offer enhancements, fixes and upgrades more quickly and with less development cost than is typical of many proprietary software vendors. In turn, our customers are able to take advantage of the quality and value of open source software, which we help develop, aggregate, integrate, test, certify, deliver, maintain and support for their enterprise use. The collectively developed software is typically distributed under open source licenses, such as the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License, that generally permit access to human-readable software source code. These licenses also provide relatively broad rights for licensees to use, copy, modify and distribute open source software. These broad rights afford significant latitude for our customers to inspect, suggest changes, customize or enhance the software if they so choose. Red Hats participation in the community-oriented development process is illustrated by Red Hats sponsorship role in the Fedora Project, JBoss.org and other open source communities. This participation enables us to leverage the efforts of these worldwide communities, which we believe allows us to reduce both development cost and time and to enhance community acceptance and support of our offerings and technologies. Thus, we are able to use the Fedora Project, JBoss.org and other open source communities as proving grounds and virtual laboratories for innovations that we can draw upon for inclusion in our enterprise technologies. Additionally, the open and transparent nature of these communities provides our customers and potential customers with access and insights into the future direction of Red Hat offerings and technologies. Our offerings Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an enterprise-class operating system that runs on a broad range of hardware, including mainframes, servers, work stations and personal computers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to meet the performance, reliability and scalability demands of large and small enterprises, from the data center to the edge of the network to cloud deployments. Red Hat JBoss Middleware delivers a range of middleware technologies for developing, deploying and managing applications that are accessible via the Internet, corporate intranets, extranets, clouds and virtual private networks. Examples of applications deployed on Red Hat JBoss Middleware include hotel and airline reservation systems, online banking, credit card processing, securities trading, healthcare systems, customer and partner portals, retail and point-of-sale systems and telecommunications network infrastructure.

[09:32] ShannonCopeland: Red Hat is a Billion Dollar company now; doubled their value in the last 3 years ... theirs should be a model to consider ... they fund research and other open source project too

[09:19] MikeBennett: OMG also has a "sponsorship" structure as well with different levels of contributions and privileges

[09:20] MikeBennett: Effort in development of standards, ontologies and so on, is by voluntary member effort, in response to perceived self interest of the institution in the activities. For OMG this might include tool vendors getting together to propose or update modeling language standards; in the EDM Council it's an investment on their part in common resources which they can then use (data quality matrices, data management maturity, FIBO ontology etc.).

[09:32] BobSmith: Perhaps a review of the OOR Mission (and implicit workflow processes) is worth a minute? Project Mission   (17YN)

The charter of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR) Initiative is to the promote the global use and sharing of ontologies by:   (17ZH) 1. establishing a hosted registry-repository;   (17ZI) 2. enabling and facilitating open, federated, collaborative ontology repositories, and   (17ZJ) 3. establishing best practices for expressing interoperable ontology and taxonomy work in registry-repositories. (17ZK) (ref. http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_01_03#nid16PN )   (17ZL) ... where,   (19K3) An ontology repository is a facility where ontologies and related information artifacts can be stored, retrieved and managed. (19K5)

Note that the "Open Ontology Repository (OOR) Initiative" is supposed to be an independent effort, and is only being incubated in the Ontolog collaborative work environment, for the time being.

[09:40] PeterYim: [action] ShannonCopeland can help start a conversation with someone at Red Hat

[09:40] ShannonCopeland: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6200209&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=DJBW&locale=en_US&srchid=bb754128-ea60-40d6-ae4a-cff9416a43ef-0&srchindex=1&srchtotal=8532&goback=%2Efps_PBCK_john+ryan_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*2_*1_Y_*1_*1_*1_false_1_R_*1_*51_*1_*51_true_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2&pvs=ps&trk=pp_profile_name_link

[09:41] ShannonCopeland: John Ryan Director, Global Business Development at Red Hat

[09:41] ToddSchneider: Have to. Good hunting.

[09:41] ToddSchneider: Oops, have to go.

[09:41] MikeDean: another possibility is to join a foundation ... e.g. becoming an Apache Incubator Project ... for infrastructure and visibility (more than for funding)

[09:43] MikeDean: http://apache.org/foundation/

[09:43] MikeDean: Andy Seaborne of Jena is VP, W3C Relations

[09:46] PeterYim: [action] MikeDean will take a lead to explore the above possibility

[09:49] PeterYim: archives of material relating to our past NSF grant proposal are at: Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/ & Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/community/project/OOR/nsf07601/ Need authenticate to access info: > username = oor-nsf07601 > password = ***

[09:49] TerryLongstreth: Have to leave -- Good Luck

[10:00] MichaelGruninger: ref. "Project Description" writeup included in http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/2008-11/msg00052.html

[10:01] MichaelGruninger: this writeup - http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/2008-11/pdfep53cnnQZZ.pdf - is still quite relevant

[10:05] PeterYim: [action] KenBaclawski will review the past proposal documents (the "Project Description" writeup especially) and update that, so we have something everyone can use or borrow from

[10:01] ShannonCopeland: Thank you. I have to sign off. Great meeting.

[10:06] BobSmith : Another call - Thanks,

[10:07] PeterYim: next meeting focused on funding - possibly Oct-30 (that's the next open OOR meeting slot); Ken will decide and announce later. We can definitely talk about this some more during the regular monthly team conf calls at the beginning on Sep-4 and Oct-9 too.

[10:08] PeterYim: great meeting!

[10:08] PeterYim: -- session ended: 10:07am PDT --

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


 * Further Question & Remarks - please post them to the [ oor-forum ] listserv
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4.1 Action items:



4.2 Schedule Next Meeting & Adjourn:


 * Next Meetings:
 * Note: no OOR meeting (next week) on Tue 2012_08_28
 * 2012_09_04 - Tuesday: regular monthly OOR Project Team Member Conference Call - OOR/ConferenceCall_2012_09_04
 * 2012_09_11 - Tuesday: OOR Architecture & API Workshop-XIII: "Enumerating OOR Use Cases" - Co-chairs: KenBaclawski & ToddSchneider - OOR/ConferenceCall_2012_09_11
 * 2012_09_18 - OOR Content Workshop-IV: "Capturing FOIS Ontology Content" - Co-chair: MichaelGruninger & MikeDean - OOR/ConferenceCall_2012_09_18
 * ... please mark your calendars and come to these events!


 * Call adjourned at: 10:07 am PDT

-- notes taken by: PeterYim / 2012.08.22-16:44 PDT All participants, please review and edit to enhance accuracy and granularity of the documented proceedings.