ConferenceCall 2008 04 03

= Joint OpenOntologyRepository-OntologySummit2008 Panel Discussion Session - Thu 3-April-2008 =


 * Subject: An Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements - Session-2


 * Session co-chairs:
 * Dr. LeoObrst (MITRE) &
 * Dr. FabianNeuhaus (NIST)


 * Panelists:
 * Dr. DougLenat (Cycorp) - "Is OpenCyc doomed to be the new Esperanto, or is OOR doomed to be the new Electronic Data Interchange, or -- even worse -- both!"
 * Mr. DekeSmith (NBIS) - "National Building Information Modeling Standard"
 * Professor MarciaZeng (Kent State U) - "Issues in reusing and sharing the content of thesauri and taxonomies in OOR"
 * Dr. DeniseBedford (WorldBank) - "Practical Requirements for Every Day Ontology Management and Use"
 * Dr. PatHayes (IHMC) - "Describing Concept Relationships"
 * Ms. MalaMehrotra (Pragati) - "Exposing and Capturing Mapping Relationships across OOR resources"
 * Dr. RobRaskin (NASA/JPL) - "SWEET 2.0 Ontology"


 * Archive:
 * slides: . [ 0-Chair ], [ 1-Lenat ], [ 2-Smith ], [ 3-Zeng ], [ 4-Bedford ], [ 5-Hayes ], [ 6-Mehrotra ], [ 7-Raskin ] ... and,
 * audio recording of the session (mp3)
 * transcript of the online chat session during the panel discussion

Conference Call Details

 * Date: Thursday, April 3, 2008 
 * Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 7:30pm CEST / 17:30 UTC
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 * Expected Call Duration: ~2.5 hours
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 * see below regarding our in-session Q & A process


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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_04_03


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


 * Acknowledgment: thanks to BruceBargmeyer, LeoObrst, MarkMusen, MichelleRaymond and PeterYim for their recommendations and help in putting together the panel.

Attendees

 * Attended:
 * LeoObrst
 * FabianNeuhaus
 * DougLenat
 * MarciaZeng
 * MalaMehrotra
 * DekeSmith
 * DeniseBedford
 * PatHayes
 * RobRaskin
 * PeterYim
 * HuajunChen
 * PeterHaase
 * BonnieSwart
 * ThomasBrunner
 * MichelleRaymond
 * KenBaclawski
 * DeborahMacPherson
 * AdrianWalker
 * RaviSharma
 * ToddSchneider
 * DougHolmes
 * MichaelGruninger
 * Harold Solbrig (Apelon)
 * Don Libes (NIST)
 * RexBrooks
 * SteveRay
 * BrandNiemann
 * Brad Bouldin (Cycorp)
 * PeterBenson
 * Rick Murphy (General Services Administration)
 * RobertoRocha
 * MikeCummens
 * BillBug
 * Gerry Radack (Concurrent Technologies)


 * Other Expecting Attendees (who may have joined us after the roll call):
 * RobertArp
 * Yung S Kim (Boeing)
 * CarlMattocks
 * Elgar Pichler (Astra Zeneca)
 * ... to register for participation, please add your name (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. ...
 * ... to register for participation, please add your name (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:
 * SuziLewis
 * AnnWrightson
 * EdDodds

Background
Two parallel initiatives are ongoing in the community, revolving around the theme of "Open Ontology Repository". On the one hand, a working group under the auspices of the OpenOntologyRepository Initiative, and on the other, the discourse (and essentially a discussion group that culminates in a two-day workshop) conducted as the main focus for OntologySummit2008.

It is at the intersection of these two initiatives that this panel discussion session is being held. The OpenOntologyRepository team is taking the opportunity to have some of its members who are bringing technology and infrastructure to the table to present them side-by-side, and to discuss how these can all fit nicely together. The OntologySummit2008 folks, on the other hand would want to take the opportunity to survey (at least a subset of) the technology & infrastructure landscape to gain insight into the state-of-art in Ontology Registry and Repository.

Besides hearing from the panelists, we are setting aside ample time after their briefings, for some good Q&A and discussions among all who are participating in this session.

Refer to details at the respective project homepages of the two initiatives at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository. & . http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2008

Agenda & Proceedings:

 * This is the second of two panel discussion sessions on "Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements." We are attemptig to bring together some of the world's top ontological content custodians and researchers, to participate in this panel discussion sessions. Besides hearing from the panelists, we are setting aside ample time (~45 minutes) after their briefings, for some good Q&A and discussions among all who will be participating in this sessions.


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


 * Agenda:
 * 1. Opening by the Session co-chairs - LeoObrst / FabianNeuhaus
 * 2. we'll go around with a self-introduction of participants (15~20 minutes) - All - we'll skip this if we have more than 25 participants (in which case, it will be best if members try to update their namesake pages on this wiki prior to the call so that everyone can get to know who's who more easily.)
 * 3. Panelists' Briefings (10 min. each) - DougLenat, DekeSmith, MarciaZeng, DeniseBedford, PatHayes, MalaMehrotra and RobRaskin
 * 5. Q & A and Open discussion by all participants (45~60 minutes) - All, via the conference call and the IM chat session.
 * 6. Summary / Conclusion / Follow-up-actions by the Session co-chairs - LeoObrst / FabianNeuhaus

Title: An Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements
Abstracts:

taxonomies in OOR"
 * Panelists - "Title" and Remarks
 * DougLenat - "Is OpenCyc doomed to be the new Esperanto, or is OOR doomed to be the new Electronic Data Interchange, or -- even worse -- both!"
 * I will be talking about OpenCyc and ResearchCyc
 * DekeSmith - "National Building Information Modeling Standard"
 * MarciaZeng - "Issues in reusing and sharing the content of thesauri and
 * 1. Introduce some terminology services (products and research projects)
 * 2. Bring up major issues in reusing and sharing the content of thesauri and taxonomies.
 * DeniseBedford - "Practical Requirements for Every Day Ontology Management and Use"
 * PatHayes - "Describing Concept Relationships"
 * MalaMehrotra - "Exposing and Capturing Mapping Relationships across OOR resources"
 * here are the top two questions I will be addressing for the panel discussion:
 * What are the various types of relationships that would be useful to discover across resources in OOR?
 * What do we need in our knowledge representation formalisms to capture such relationships?
 * RobRaskin - "SWEET 2.0 Ontology"

Resources:

 * this session is a continuation from session-1, details of which can be found at: ConferenceCall_2008_03_27
 * to minimize duplication of discussions on issues already covered at the last session, participants who were not with us last week are encouraged to catch up from the Mar-27 session proceedings.


 * Our panel's prepared slides can be accessed by clicking on each of the title links below:
 * [ 0-Chair ] - http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/OOR-Requirements-Panel-2--LeoObrst-FabianNeuhaus_20080403.ppt
 * [ 1-Lenat ] - http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/OOR--DougLenat_20080403.ppt
 * [ 2-Smith ] http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/NBIMS-Ontologies--DekeSmith_20080403.ppt
 * [ 3-Zeng ] - http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/Reuse-n-Sharing-Content-in-OOR--MarciaZeng_20080403.ppt
 * [ 4-Bedford ] http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/Everyday-Requirements-for-OOR--DeniseBedford_20080403.ppt
 * [ 5-Hayes ] http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/Describing-Ontology-Relationships-in-CL--PatHayes_20080403.pdf
 * [ 6-Mehrotra ] http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/Mapping-Relationships--MalaMehrotra_20080403.pdf
 * [ 7-Raskin ] - http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/Requirements-Panel/SWEET--RobRaskin_20080403.ppt


 * To participate in the online discourse to further explore the subject matter, please subscribe to our open archived discussion forums as appropriate:
 * to participate in the OpenOntologyRepository Initiative - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository#nid17YX
 * to participate in the OntologySummit2008 Initiative - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2008#nid18V7


 * additional resources:
 * (... to be added by the panel)

Questions, Answers & Discourse:

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Questions and Discussion captured from the chat session:
VNC2: Welcome to the: Joint OpenOntologyRepository-OntologySummit2008 Panel Discussion Session Subject: An Open Ontology Repository: Rationale, Expectations & Requirements - Session-2

PeterYim: to all the "anonymous' participants, Please change your name from 'anonymous' using the Settings button to your real name (in WikiWord format)

PeterBenson: At the 3rd IEEE Conference on Standardization held on October 24, 2003 Timothy Schoechle from the International Center for Standards Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder presented an interesting paper titled Digital Enclosure: The Privatization of Standards and Standardization, in which he made the following statement: In the field of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) such standards specify everything from the prongs on plugs and cables to the software protocols that make the Internet work. Historically, these standards have been set largely by volunteer participants in committees that operate within a wide range of environments, institutional rules and social practices; but in general they have espoused a traditional commitment to general principles of democratic deliberation, consensus, public accessibility and balanced stakeholder representation. The historical practice is now being challenged by newer, more private organizations that do not necessarily have a commitment to the same principles. we must be careful that the OOR clearly highlights any restrictions on the use of any ontology included in the OOR.

RaviSharma: Dr. Doug Lenat Is there an attempt in OpenCyc or ResearchCyc to categorise the type and complexity of relationships that improve the usability of the millions of assertions, any analysis done?

DougLenat: Answer to Ravi: Yes, we actually chose the OpenCyc relations to be the most useful ones from full Cyc. And we would be happy to revisit that and add more as other people point out useful ones from Cyc that we haven't included.

LeoObrst: Question to Doug: Given Cyc's long experience with such matters, can you provide the OOR group with what you would suggest as a "small set of inter-ontology alignment relations"? Which are necessary and which are desirable?

DougLenat: Response to Leo: Yes, I would be happy to provide the set of (surprisingly few) predicates we use to state those inter-ontology correspondences. I will send that out and/or post it today or tomorrow.

BillBug: Dr. Lenat - I strongly agree with your identifying the need for synonymy mapping. A few questions - (1) given Dr. Zeng's presentation, do you think SKOS works for this purpose? (2) Should SKOS be used in OWL, where SKOS would essentially provide an orthogonal semantics for managing an ontology lexicon? (3) Should an OOR adopt a particular standard for providing these synonymous mappings?

DougLenat: Response to BillBug: Take a look at what I just promised for Leo, and then see if that answers your question. I was pleased to see what SKOS does in this particular area, and need to look at it in more detail. We need e.g. to represent cases where one concept is merely strongly related to one in another ontology, not equivalent to it, and if you're not careful there is a slippery slope where you end up wanting all of the predicates you use WITHIN your ontology because after all those are the predicates you deemed worthy/important to interrelate the terms in your ontology, so it only makes sense that you might want to use them among ontologies. Somewhere between that (everything) and n=1 (equivalentConceptInOntology) is the sweet spot of the curve.

PatHayes: Doug: please include me in that inter-ontology mailing, thanks.

DougLenat: Will do

PeterYim: to Dr. Lenat: do you see enough differentiation even for the OOR team implementation effort (note, not the OntologySummit2008 intelectual pursuit) to exists. If so, how should this effort line up with the LarKC

RexBrooks: Question for Deke: Are you aware of the City GML effort?

LeoObrst: Question for Deke: The NBIMS (slide 8, for example) seems to consist of multiple taxonomies, is that right? Do you need relations among the nodes too?

PatHayes: Question for Marcia: Can you enlarge on the point on your slide 18? What do you mean by 'non-symmetrical' here?

MarciaZeng: Pat, for example, under 'tax', the sub-classes or narrower terms in different versions from different countries are different even they all fit in the same multi-lingual thesaurus.

PatHayes: Thanks, Marcia.

RaviSharma: Dr. MarciaZeng - What would happen to the content of current ontologies if we were to exclude relationships associated with Thesauri and Taxonomies (the natural language free flow usage e.g. less logic based). How much would be left? Further, is there a value chain concept of Information content from complexity or concatenation of relationships? Further many times I get a feeling that knowledge and understanding floodgates would open if we could transform (transliterate or map) concepts and understanding from major cultural and lingual groups alone?

MarciaZeng: Dr. RaviSharma, 1. I think even though the relationships are not consistently logic and highly structured, many hierarchical relationships best presented in the domain which do not have a widely accepted 'taxonomy' like in biology. So, if you only want to use the work for controlling synonyms and disambiguate terms, you may miss lots of good hierarchical structures. 2. Yes, it is difficult to map among the multilingual and multi-cultural vocabularies, e.g., about traditional medicine or even geographic regions.

PatHayes: Question for Denise: can you enlarge on your distinction between metadata and metainformation? I'm not familiar with the second term.

RaviSharma: Ms. MalaMehrotra As we have in astrophysical coordinate systems, or in translating among different inertial and other reference coordinate systems, are solvers and translators similarly being conceptualized among different ontology representations of TIME or INTERVAL or DURATION?

RaviSharma: Ms. MalaMehrotra - Further, is the value of human collaboration in terms of enriching the value of domain based relationships for future automated processing and is there a roadmap for the same with use cases?

RaviSharma: Dr. RobRaskin Is slide 5 a hierarchical relationship among ontologies or is it taxonomy of science disciplines? Especially since the type of relationships are not indicated among them?

LeoObrst: Question to Rob: Is the "Data Ontology" the same as the SWEET ontologies, or is the former part of SWEET? And do you find you need "rules"?

LeoObrst: Question to Rob: What kind of methodology did you use in the creation of the SWEET ontologies, i.e., requirements-driven (competency questions?) and then what kind of review process, and gateway/quality criteria?

PeterYim: to Dr. Raskin ... given your prevailing work in SWEET and PlanetOnt.org (which is an OOR in its own right), I would like to invite you to join us in the OOR-team (which is cast as an implementation effort, independent of the OntologySummit2008 effort, which focuses in the intellectual discussion of the Open Ontology Repository & Resgistry subject matter.) see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository

PeterYim: the same invitation goes to anyone else who want to contribute to the OOR-implementation effort

LeoObrst: Question to Marcia: I think you are saying that the OOR will need both terminological resources and ontologies/conceptual resources? Do you think SKOS can provide a terminological framework for term taxonomies/thesari and perhaps a term->concept indexing into ontologies?

MarciaZeng: Leo: yes I think the terminological resources could be part of the conceptual resources. Some 'ontologies' claimed on the Web are no better than a taxonomy.

MarciaZeng: Leo: SKOS probably can handle well thesauri, but, for how to present mapping results, SKOS may not be perfect so far. It is working on that direction.

ToddSchneider: Pat, Moving towards 'truth' should be seen as the 'to-be' that an OOR will evolve too.

PatHayes: Todd, I think that many of us would strongly disagree. Which was exactly my main point.

MichelleRaymond: Panelists - It was noted that the Architecture for an Ontology Repository may differ depending on the Ontologies held (and? the relationships between held Ontologies). If this is so, I suspect this is not simply based on the complexity of the Ontologies (dictionary, taxonomy, relational data map, ontology, ontologies with guiding upper ontology...) A) Can we have one Arch. approach?  If the statement before is accepted, what are the characteristics that direct you toward selection of the Architecture structure? Examples?

PatHayes: Michelle: depends what you mean by 'architecture'. As far as management/metadata issues go, I think there can be a common uniform framework. But if that means all using the same ontology language, for example, then I'd say no, for an open ontology.

ToddSchneider: Can we use the TOGAF notion of 'architecture'?

MichelleRaymond: Reply to Todd re TOGAF - My understanding of TOGAF is only at the higher level of different "layers" for enterprise level structures and rules, data structuring and storage, components and application availability and connectivity and ? I think the "network" level. These are important and part of the framework for any architecture. Where a thread might help is in describing the notation of TOGAF and suggestions as to its usefulness. Does the TOGAF force a specific direction of centralized, decentralized, federated or other core concept for architecture data locations and management practices?

ToddSchneider: Leo, Would it be possible to extend your list of requirements by culling the presentations from these last two meetings?

PeterYim: to Todd, answering your question for Leo ... YES, of course (this is what these panel discussion sessions were designed for)

MichelleRaymond: Reply to ToddSchneider's question to Leo - Absolutely, the Content Committee is culling these presentations and question threads. However, it is very helpful for individuals to push forward their personal favorite Ah-ha's and questions as new discussion threads on the OntologySummit2008 list.

KenBaclawski: Leo asked at the last session if the panelists could prioritize their requirements. Specifically he asked about the top three services of an OOR.

DougLenat: See my slide 9: the 4 things we would want from a good host

DougLenat: Commons (not GNU) license; provenance kept; agreement on at least a few key relations; agreement on inter-ontology relations.

PatHayes: doug: why not the GNU licence? Too "open" ??

Audio Recording of this Session

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 * Conference Date and Time:	03-Apr-2008 10:45am~1:03pm PDT
 * Duration of Recording:	2 Hour 16 Minutes
 * Recording File Size:	       15.5 MB (in mp3 format)
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