Hi Till and all, (01)
Here is my preliminary review of the Ontology, Model and Specification
Integration and Interoperability (OntoIOp) draft RFP, ad/13-11-03. (02)
First, I'd like to congratulate the team on the vast improvement I've
seen in the RFP over the last several months. It's really come a long
way in terms of (1) clarifying the problem and set of use cases you're
attempting to address, (2) narrowing the scope, and (3) providing much
clearer and more concise requirements for implementation. (03)
I've had several conversations with the team, including this morning,
and the following is a summary of my comments on this version of the RFP. (04)
1. Some of the language still reads a little clumsily, primarily due to
the fact that it was written by non-native speakers of English. I've
provided some detailed edits under separate cover, especially to the
background sections of the RFP, to assist in cleaning this up, but
another review pass, perhaps by Michael or Peter, would be useful. (05)
2. Some of the use cases could be described more succinctly. The
background remains quite useful in illustrating what the authors are
looking for, but could be tightened up a bit more for the sake of
readability. Use case 4 is a bit lengthy in particular. (06)
3. Section 6.3 needs to either discuss why the various OMG
specifications called out are related to OntoIOp, as it does for the
ODM, or remove the reference. For example, if MOF QVT is related, is it
a requirement for the submitters to use QVT as one of the mapping
paradigms leveraged by the OntoIOp meta-language at an implementation
level, i.e., should the submitters provide extensions to QVT as one of
the required platform-specific implementations of the
platform-independent meta-language (if it is indeed
platform-independent). If not, should submitters be required to state
why not? I see you have this as one of the issues to be discussed, but
a short phrase about how each of the standards relates specifically to
OntoIOp should be included here, especially any that are explicitly
required to be used. (07)
4. Formulas in 6.5.2 need to be explained in English. (08)
5. Section 6.5.6 needs some additional work -- it seems to conflate the
notions of registry and repository, which should be teased out and
explained more clearly. It also seems to be somewhat out of scope from
the other requirements -- I am not convinced that OntoIOp should require
submitters to specify requirements for either a registry or repository,
only requirements of the meta-language relevant to its usage in a
registry context. You would have to develop requirements for
governance, for ensuring uniqueness of identifiers, establish processes
for registration, etc., which are all orthogonal to development of the
meta-language itself. (09)
At most, specification of the technology, rules, processes, etc. related
to the registry should be an optional requirement, and perhaps only
something to be discussed in terms of how this might be done. I realize
that some of the Ontolog OOR / COLORE work is doing this, but there are
commercial tools for general purpose registries, both ISO
11179-compliant and otherwise, that could be augmented to support this.
They may not be freely available or open-source, but they certainly
exist. OMG's CTS2 standard provides some of the capabilities that might
be leveraged to support this, among others, as well. (010)
6. Section 6.6.1 - this seems to be more about justification for use of
the meta-language rather than requirements for the language itself, and
APIs such as those in work for API4KBs should be able to be used as the
basis for development in conjunction with the set of ontologies and
meta-language the RFP is asking for. (011)
7. Section 6.8 -- Evaluation criteria could be a bit more explicit with
respect to a minimum set of requirements that must be met. (012)
8. 6.9 is blank -- either delete this section or say something like
"None", if there isn't anything else you want to say here. (013)
9. 6.11 -- I think the timetable for your LOI deadline is short, and
would push it out another meeting cycle. The rest looks aggressive, but
I recognize that there is significant work backing this up already. (014)
I'll look forward to working through this with Fabian next week, (015)
Elisa (016)
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