Ontology Summit 2012 Tracks
Given the broad scope of this year's theme, the summit was initially partitioned into four tracks alongside two cross-tracks, each track is listed below. Early on, it emerged that discussions regarding ontology for engineering systems and ontology for systems engineering contained significant overlap, and the two were merged into one. Two cross-tracks were also included as they include topics that were relevant to all the other tracks. Over the course of three months, each track solicited participation from experts in business and academia who presented relevant material in weekly on-line teleconferences. The track synthesis alongside links to the community and teleconferences are contained on each track page.
Big Systems & System Engineering: This track aims to bring key challenges to light with large-scale systems and systems of systems for ontology and identify where solutions exist, where the problems require significant research, and where we can work towards solutions as part of this summit.
Big Data Challenge: The mission of this track is to identify appropriate objectives for an "Ontology and Big Data" challenge, prepare problem statements, identify the organizations and people to be advocates, and identify the resources necessary to complete a challenge. The goal will be to select a challenge showing benefits of ontology to big data.
Large-scale Domain Applications: This track will help to ground the discussions and bring key challenges to light by describing current large-scale systems that (could) use ontologies in their deployment. "Large-scale" can mean either very large data sets, very complex data sets, federated systems, highly distributed systems, or real-time, continuous data systems.
Quality and Large-scale Systems: This cross-track aspect will focus on the evaluation of ontologies within the context of Big Systems applications. Whether creating, developing, using, reusing, or searching for ontologies for use in big systems, engineers, architects, designers, developers and project owners will encounter questions about ontology evaluation and quality. How should those questions be answered? How do we know whether an ontology is fit for use in (or on) a large-scale engineered system or a large-scale systems engineering effort? This cross-track aspect ties together the evaluation-related discussions that arise within the Summit Tracks and individual sessions, providing a context in which to take up and address the issues generally. Specific focus will evolve with recurring themes, potentially including such topics as ontology quality characteristics, fitness for purpose, requirements, metrics, evaluation methodologies and resources.
Federation and Integration of Systems: This track will bring together a cross-disciplinary group of experts to address the application of ontologies and semantic technologies to the federation, integration and sharing of processes, services and information across systems. Topics include:
- Statements of real-world problems and use cases that demand federation and integration.
- Analysis of current standards and techniques (including semantic technologies) for solving federation and integration – where these techniques are succeeding and where they are lacking.
- The viewpoint of experts on the application of ontologies and semantic technologies to the federation and integration problem elaborated with the required approaches, standards, tools and technologies.
- Terminologies and architectures supporting semantic integration and federation.
- A discussion of practical outcomes and next steps.
