ConferenceCall 2009 08 06

= Joint Ontolog-OOR Panel Discussion Session - Thu 6-August-2009 =

Topic: Ontology Repository Research Issues


 * Abstract: In this session, potential OpenOntologyRepository (OOR) contributors will discuss longer term issues relating to both tools and content development. See developing thoughts at: OOR/ResearchIssues

Session Chair: Professor KenBaclawski (Northeastern University) - [ opening slides ]

Panelists:


 * Professor MichaelGruninger (University of Toronto)
 * Ms. ElisaKendall (Sandpiper Software)
 * Mr. BartGajderowicz (Ryerson University, Canada)
 * Dr. Mathieu d'Aquin (Open University, UK)
 * Dr. ToddSchneider (Raytheon)

Archives

 * Abstract
 * Prepared slides can be accessed by clicking on each of the title links below. Some files are available in multiple formats.
 * Slides: . [ 0-chair ppt ] . [ 1-Gruninger ] . [ 2-Kendall ppt ] . [ 3-Gajderowicz ] . [ 4-d'Aquin ] . [ 5-Schneider ppt ] . 
 * [ Audio Recording of the session ] [ 1:51:31 ; mp3 ; 12.8 MB ]
 * [ Transcript of the online chat session ] during the panel discussion
 * Resources

Conference Call Details

 * Date: Thursday, August 6, 2009 
 * Start Time: 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT / 7:30pm CEST / 6:30pm BST / 17:30 UTC
 * see world clock for other time zones
 * Expected Call Duration: ~2.0 hours
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Attendees

 * Attended:
 * KenBaclawski
 * MichaelGruninger
 * ElisaKendall
 * MikeDean
 * LeoObrst
 * MikeBennett
 * BartGajderowicz
 * KurtConrad
 * JerrySmith
 * ToddSchneider
 * JoelBender
 * Yung Kim
 * Daniel Redmon
 * MathieuDaquin
 * Roger Burkhart (OMG; John Deere)
 * ArturoSanchez
 * CarlosRueda
 * ElgarPichler
 * PatCassidy
 * RaviSharma
 * TrishWhetzel
 * PaulAlexander
 * RaviSharma


 * Expecting:
 * KatherineGoodier
 * BrandNiemann
 * RoyRoebuck
 * MichaelDorf
 * Timothy Williams (CAP SNOMED Terminology Solutions)
 * RobertHoehndorf
 * PavithraKenjige


 * Regrets:
 * PeterYim
 * AlexGarcia

Abstract
emphasis on metadata requirements and related research questions, are identified. developed that provide ontology repository facilities. While they have a lot in common, many elements and features seems to be missing, and I will introduce a few of them (support in finding suitable ontologies,  relations between ontologies, interoperability between systems), hoping to generate discussions on the current research and development challenges in the area of ontology repositories.
 * "COLORE: Common Logic Ontology Repository" by MichaelGruninger
 * Abstract: The purpose and architecture of COLORE are described.
 * "OOR for Public Sector Use" by ElisaKendall
 * Abstract: Requirements for OOR for use in the public sector, with
 * "Utilizing Uncertainty for Automated Ontology Mapping" by BartGajderowicz
 * Abstract: A mapping module for the OOR platform
 * "Ontology Repositories: Discussions and Perspectives" by Mathieu d'Aquin
 * Abstract: Besides the OOR initiatives, many different systems have been
 * "OOR Research Questions" by ToddSchneider
 * Abstract: Research questions on these topics
 * Ontology driven development
 * Administration
 * Terminology mediation
 * Interpretation

Resources:

 * OOR/ResearchIssues
 * OpenOntologyRepository - Homepage for this OOR initiative
 * from the two recent Ontolog-OOR panel sessions:
 * ConferenceCall_2009_07_16
 * ConferenceCall_2009_07_30
 * [ oor-forum ] message archive - http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-forum/
 * (if you are not yet subscribed) you may subscribe yourself to the [ oor-forum ] listserv, by sending a blank email to  from your subscribing email address, and then follow the instructions you receive back from the mailing list system.

Agenda
1. Opening by session Chair (KenBaclawski)

2. Perspectives from the Panel

3. Q & A and Open Discussion (All) -- please refer to process above

4. Summary and Next Steps (KenBaclawski)

Proceedings
Please refer to the archives above

IM Chat Transcript captured during the session: ...

MikeBennett: Manufacturing standards are surely not the only kinds of standards? e.g. financial standards

ArturoSanchez: Question for Michael: have you studied decidability properties of the logical relationships among ontologies mentioned on slide 4 (e.g., extension). How about complexity?

MichaelGruninger: Response to MikeBennett: Of course, COLORE will not be restricted to manufacturing standards, but since we are receiving our funding through the Dept of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering our emphasis is on manufacturing standards. In the context of the OOR project, we definitely need to encompass all of the standards discussed at the 2009 Ontology Summit.

MikeBennett: Thanks Michael. I mention it because the sorts of fundamental building blocks you mention were all needed to develop the financial industry ontology we're working on, and I'd expect to try and align with the things you are talking about, and with "industrial" standards generally (and UN etc. standards e.g. FAO Country Ontology).

PatCassidy: MIke: do we yet have examples of 'definably interpretable' domain ontologies interpretable with respect to some foundation ontology? That is the mechanism that seems to me to be the most plausible means to general semantic interoperability, even in the absence of a repository. It will be nice to have examples to point to.

RaviSharma: Mike - mereotopology is just one example I hope? because in rela manufacturing life, the processes of assembly and sequence of events and processes are quite seperable, often!

MikeBennett: @Pat, Ravi: Mike = Michael I presume.

RaviSharma: Elisa - reuse is good to think but can wwe give some concrete examples, such as a part, process, domain levels?

ElisaKendall: Question for Michael (when time permits): Have you looked at a combination of ISO 11179 and 19763 as starting points for the metadata you might need for COLORE? I realize that they may not be complete in terms of the kinds of characterization you might want to do, but ... the crosswalk I mentioned might be helpful if you haven't already created something like that yourselves

JoelBender: Elisa - when you talked about "Requirements range from understanding sources ... at the ontology level to detailed provenance at the fact/individual level" and said that was independent of the encoding - I'm curious how you think that could actually be accomplished.

RaviSharma: BArt - fuzzy levels not only at probabilistic levels, but do we not have to define probabilistIC relationships or fuzzy relationship groupings to create or associate triples with a search or identify objects of relevance

ElisaKendall: Response to Ravi: There are many kinds of reuse under consideration -- ranging from general / utility / foundational (to use Michael's term) ontologies supporting messaging (headers, channel definitions, etc. for an event bus) and other aspects of software engineering, to reusable terms defining missions, spacecraft, instruments ... some of which are dictated by standards from CCSDS and others

BartGajderowicz: @Ravi: yes, creating probabilistic and fuzzy relationships are key, these may be added by ontologists if they are relevant to the domain or context, but may also be derived through machine learning based on the experiences being represented by the ontology, and added as meta data specifically for performing mappings

RaviSharma: Elisa - thanks, but we need to start thinking about how valuable the reuse has been, almost all casses require a commonly understood "framework", Concept or Context or many such agreements before reuse is possible similar to code or software component or pattern reuse?

ElisaKendall: Response to Joel: One approach might be to have registry-level metadata defined (standards based, possibly using ISO 11179, 19763, 1087, etc.) at the registry level, to provide the level of provenance required per ontology, and then incorporate annotations for the ontologies themselves, where possible. The annotations could be managed independently of the ontologies themselves, but don't necessarily need to be -- BioPortal does some of this, or is starting to do some of this, but for our work, we anticipate that internal ontology and model developers will provide this as part of the registration process. This is only possible if participants in the registry agree to do so, of course -- and given that we're dealing with a controlled environment for this project, we can also provide the submission processes and requirements. That may not be doable on a broader, open level, though we could suggest some minimal set of annotations that we would like to see, and even provide templates that are representation-specific

JoelBender: thank you!

MichaelGruninger: Response to PatCassidy: We have several papers that specify the definable interpretations. One appeared earlier this year at the Commonsense Reasoning Symposium (relating process ontologies) and the other will appear in AI Journal, which relates a particular mereotopology with classes of lattices. I just noticed that these papers are not on our website yet -- I will post them there later.

MichaelGruninger: Response to Elisa: You're right -- they key is metadata about the ontologies. I think that ISO19763 provides a good framework for capturing the relevant ontology relationships as metadata, but we still need to understand what relationships are essential to ontology design and reuse.

MichaelGruninger: Response to Ravi: Yes, of course, mereotopology is just one example. Using application scenarios that require the integration of multiple ontologies (as you suggest) is the right way to go in driving the development of the repository.

RaviSharma: Michael - we also need to agree on what minimum type of relationships are required for at least a minimal or upper ontology. Then Meta data level comparisons of two or more ontology constructs (patterns like - including metadata) can be more productive or efficient?

RaviSharma: Mathieu - wonderful; if there is nothing common that these exist as independent un connected ontologies, then only benefit is by the ingeneuity of the User as to how they use these unconnected ontologies? like going to grocery store and coming home to cook the food?

MathieuDaquin: Ravi - very good point. Nothing connects two ontologies better than their combined use/application. Hard to monitor, though.

RaviSharma: Todd - what do you mean by Code in repository? I thought we support multiple languages, patterns, fraworks and domains and even globalization in principle?

MikeBennett: Terminology: in terms of metadata for ontologies, would this not be realised by way of meta-terms for aliases, synonyms? Should synonym and a single "alias" for reference within ODD be two separate tags?

ArturoSanchez: Comment for Todd and Michael: the practical issue is how can end-users express their 'intentions' or 'intuitions' using existing ontologies w/o having prior training in formal ontologies. Guided selection (via interpretations using mathematical structures) might lead to choosing axioms the end-user (the person modelling a certain situation) might not find 'intuitively' compelling. So, I think that Michael and Todd presented two important extremes of the problem: (1) importance of formalizing relationships among ontologies; (2) practical use of collections of ontologies. I'm interested in the research problem of bridging these two extremes.

RaviSharma: Ken- your slide 8 is a representation of executable ontologies where the data from sensors etc get filled based on the metadata values and relationships think of this as templates and filled in forms.

MikeBennett: @Ken: domains is a bit of a simplification in that slide I presume? Terms for legal, mathematical, accounting etc. have terms which /should/ be reused in models in other domains - for instance much of business meaning is grounded in legal realities.

RaviSharma: Ken- slide 11 reasoning, relationships and nature of Things (objects) are key parameters in achieving semantics as well as interoperability.

MikeBennett: @Ravi: is one issue the question of whether a given ontology simply /asserts/ that some term is meaningful, or whether it has enough facts defined about the thing to reliably pin down its meaning, i.e. the "context" that was spoken of.

KenBaclawski: @Mike: I fully agree with you. The diagram does not show inter-ontology relationships. It really must. Is there an easy way to show this in the diagram?

MikeBennett: @Ken: Possibly not, other than by creating an overall map somehow...

RaviSharma: to Ken - just for record, I document that we need a map and or a framework or an agreement on domains and some upperlevel ontology to include others that would somehow be parts or subset of it and then there is hope for interoperability or reuse.

KenBaclawski: @Ravi: Executable ontologies is a very interesting idea. In practice, scientists acquire their data and then analyze it and only as the last step do they annotate it for reuse. It would be quite a change in attitude to use the metadata annotations to drive the sensor data acquisition.

RaviSharma: Ken- The ontology part is new but for SOS earth science data we do a metadata based query and identify the datasets of interest say using HDF_EOS set of metadata, then we navigate to those sets, ontology would be akin to relatime further processing these datasets for knowledge or at least information extraction.

KenBaclawski: @Ravi: Is that really true? While the ideal is to take a top-down approach, in practice we have a large number of relatively independent communities that deal with interoperability only after the fact.

RaviSharma: Ken - the community of earth scientists using satellite (NASA) data agreed on a framework not ontology in 1996-98 and then these datasets were generated, hence we can subset metadata values and then traverse across the areas (geotemporal) of interest.

MikeBennett: There was a good talk a year or so back about a set of relationships between ontology elements that are analogous to the owl:sameAS but a much broader set of such e.g. sub-sets and the like.

RaviSharma: Mike- yes but defining a broader set of sameAs implies knowledge built-in in the owl:sameAs

MichaelGruninger: Sorry, I have another call at 3:30. Great meeting today!

MikeBennett: @Ravi: Good point.

MikeBennett: @Elisa: you are describing a quality assurance framework - great points

RaviSharma: Elisa - I fully appreciate your public sector need comment and similarly for citizen services I hope.


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Audio Recording of this Session
Special thanks to KurtConrad for his help in making the audio recording of this session. =ppy


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 * Conference Date and Time:	6-Aug-2009 10:38am~12:30pm PDT
 * Duration of Recording:	1 Hour 52 Minutes
 * Recording File Size:	       12.8 MB (in mp3 format)
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