As way of introduction, I am a software developer working for ARAMARK
Corporation - a mid-size corporation primarily focused on food and facility
services. I work as a project leader for the IT team of the School Support
Services division, a division that manages the cafeterias for many public and
private school districts across the United States. I work at the headquarters
offices in downtown Philadelphia, PA. (01)
I've been working since the early 1980s developing various RDBMS based
applications. I'm currently developing a fairly hefty sized management decision
support system that focuses on the collection of Inventory, Expenses and
Revenue information. I began studying Ontologies only recently. I'm
particularly interested in the use of Ontologies as a potentially powerful
mechanism for describing business processes. (02)
I'm particularly interested in Ontolog forum as a way to further understand and
refine business standards. I first came across Ontolog during my study of Jenz
& Partner's Business Management Ontology (BMO) (03)
http://www.bpiresearch.com/Resources/RE_OSSOnt/re_ossont.htm (04)
This ontology seeks to describe in an OWL ontology some of the features of
ebXML among other things. During my studies, it became clear to me that I was
going to need some assistance. Although I highly respect the work Dieter Jenz
is doing, I can't help thinking that it's not quite the right approach. When I
found Ontolog forum, I knew I was on the right track.
I've begun to study OntoClean and listened to the Chris Welty conference call.
I'm quite fascinated by his Team's work. I am having difficulty in seeing how
to apply his work with a tool like Protégé - granted I need to finish reading
Chris' paper - not to mention re-reading Ontology 101. But I think it would be
a worthwhile sub-project to study OntoClean and write up some guidelines for
applying this methodology to Protégé and Protégé-OWL tools as a first step in
documenting how to _apply_ OntoClean using such tools. I'd be happy to work on
such a project as it would greatly help me in learning more about the technical
and logical process of building Ontologies (something I'm not too good at right
now but would like to be). (05)
My desire to pursue the OWL language and specifically OWL-DL comes from the
Protégé-OWL plug. I've become quite enamored with it's ease of use and
stability - there's a few problems in the 3.0 Beta but I find those problems to
be mere annoyances. I'm encouraged by the enormous interest in the user
community based on the amount of activity on the plug-ins forum. Restricting my
choice of constructs to OWL-DL seems to make the Racer inference engine work
better - this makes sense based on my research of OWL reference material at the
W3C. (06)
So OWL seems a worthy language to master. I am interested however in hearing
people's opinion on the mapping of OWL to more expressive languages like KIF.
Although, I'm still learning Protégé/OWL and description logics in general, I'm
very interesting in knowing where OWL-DL is falling short. In the Protégé plug
in, there is a section of the form for the entry of asserted conditions so that
the axiomatic? features of the OWL-DL can be entered. This section of the form
seems structured in much the same way as many of the things discussed in Dr
Welty's paper on OntoClean. (07)
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2004_11_18 (08)
So, I'm left wondering, how much is missing out of OWL-DL and how much is too
much when it comes to pure logic in terms of getting real business work done
(like modeling business process using Core Components)? (09)
I look forward to sitting in on many more conference calls and studying this
fascinating discipline with you. (010)
Scott L Holmes
Project Leader, SSS IT, ARAMARK Corporation
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