UBL-Ontology Project Conference Call - Thu 2003-03-27    (5ZD)

Agenda Ideas    (602)

Agenda    (603)

Meeting Details    (604)

Date: Thursday, March 27, 2003 Start Time: 10:30 am PST / 1:30pm EST End Time: 11:20 PST (reserved to 11:55 a.m. PST) Parties: 20    (605)

Dial-in Number: 1-702-851-3330 (Las Vegas, Nevada) Access Code: 030327    (606)

No VNC will be provided for this meeting. Instead, point browsers to the browsers to the wiki for this meeting:    (607)

   http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Conference_Call_2003-03-27    (608)

Agenda    (609)

1) Welcome    (60A)

2) Appointment of secretary to take minutes (use Wiki?)    (60B)

3) Roll-call of participants    (60C)

4) ?Wrap up? on goals (anyone who missed last meeting)    (60D)

5) Communication logistics & work protocols    (60E)

   a. VNC / screen sharing
   b. Wiki
   c. Threads / subject lines / use of Purple Numbers
   d. Posting of HTML messages / checking posts
   e. Regular conference calls    (60F)

6) Summaries of Proposed Methodologies    (60G)

   a. Stanford / Protégé Ontology 101
   b. Guarino & Welty OntoClean
   c. Role of Wiki
   d. Other approaches (Gomez, et. al.)    (60H)

7) Methodology issues    (60I)

   a. Strengths and weaknesses
   b. Completeness (degree of formalization, superset / subset)
   c. Class modeling 
        see http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/parsons00emancipating.html    (60J)

8) Ready for vote on methodologies?    (60K)

9) Use cases    (60L)

   a. What used for?
   b. What needs to be included?
   c. Assessment of existing UBL use cases    (60M)

10) Tasking    (60N)

    a. Previous assignments
    b. New assignments    (60O)

11) Other Business    (60P)

Proceedings    (60Q)

1. Participants:    (60R)

2. Kurn Conrad reintroduced the question of goals.    (60Z)

3. Adam Pease stated that he is interested in Ontology content definition. Specifically logical axioms.    (610)

4. Monica explained the plan/process for the UBL committee on their plans to refine the business information entities.    (613)

5. Kurt added that the UBL committee started out with a business vocabulary (existing library of terms). This consists of core components and business information entities. Mostly developed at the level of vocabularies.    (614)

6. Adam asked is their a compact specification of the business information entities?    (615)

7. Adam stated that there is an advantage for this domain specific ontology to be an extension of an upper ontology. So we need to put it on the agenda to pick an upper level ontology.    (61A)

8. Kurt asked if anyone else had suggestions for goals.    (61G)

9. Next agenda item: Communication logistics. Addressing problem areas in the infrastructure.    (61K)

10. Next agenda item: Ontology building methodology.    (61M)

11. SamHunting mentioned that common sense is good and that we should not get into religious battles.    (61Q)

12. KurtConrad mentioned a paper on citeseer (URL is on wiki) that warns against exclusively relying on class modeling for this.    (61R)

13. AdamPease mentioned that there really is no widespread consensus on a specific methodology. There is no standard methodology for ontology development. There is no cookbook procedure and that does not relate to a lack of quality.    (61V)

14. KurtConrad feels we need a methodology czar.    (61W)

15. LeoObrst joined the call.    (621)

16. Kurt rephrased the position. We can use the Ontology 101 method up to step 6 and at that point we need to stop and pick a set of tools.    (625)

17. Adam is impressed that this group is very functional.    (626)

18. The group adopted the following position:    (627)

19. Kurt brought up the article again that relying too heavily on class modeling can skew the results.    (629)

20. Next agenda item: use cases.    (62C)

based upon our own priority for use cases (our own goal). One use case may be: a company wants to buy something for another company via a particular type of transaction in a specific context. For example a buy versus a sell.    (62E)

21. Pat Cassidy joined the call.    (62K)

22. Adam Pease suggested that defining scope is critical. He related a story of a group that has been working for several years on just an ontology for what appears on the front of an envelope.    (62L)

23. Kurt asked if the UBL use cases enough?    (62M)

24. Meeting was adjourned.    (62P)