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Re: [ontolog-forum] Planning for the scheduled discussion of 2005.04.28

To: nicolas.rouquette@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Peter Yim <peter.yim@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 11:33:48 -0700
Message-id: <4262AC0C.70600@xxxxxxxx>
Thanks, Nicolas. ... a lot to cover, indeed.    (01)


Along the line of your "...focus the discussion down to a 
reasonable scope", I think your 2005-03-03 proposals (ref: 
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologDiscussion#nid9IB 
)of having (A) "Ontologies and Reasoning" (or "Ontologies and 
Reasoners" in one discussion, and (B) "Tagging Content" - tagging 
ontolog content as a use case (and a "eating our own dog food" 
move) would be a better split-up. Maybe even those, should be 
pared down in scope to allow both (a) a intro to the subject (for 
people who are less than familiar with the topic and would be 
interested to learn), and (b) an adequate technical discussion by 
the expertise that we can drawn upon from within and without the 
ontolog community.    (02)

We might be able to pull (B) off more readily. We even had a 
good discussion on that a while back (e.g. see thread at: 
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum//ontolog-forum/2002-11/msg00058.html 
), your 2005-03-03 proposal and the more recent interest 
indicated by Professor Ken Fields, convener of the Digital Art 
Ontology CoP <dao.cim3.net> (ref: 
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2005-04/msg00009.html 
) would indicate that it's worth pursuing.    (03)

As for (A), the topic is definitely of interest. Although, we 
might make it even more interesting if there is some time to pool 
together more inputs and make sure we can get some expert 
discussion panelists to join us (which we may, or may not be able 
to pull off, given that there's a bit more than a week from 4/28 
now). Getting someone to kick us off on, for example 
Protege-Racer, SUMO-Vampire, SNARK, ...etc. in a session like 
that would be great!    (04)

Input, please ... folks from SMI/Protege, SUMO, SRI, MITRE, ...    (05)

Cheers.  =ppy
--    (06)


Nicolas F Rouquette wrote Thu, 14 Apr 2005 17:53:52 -0700:
> As the proverb goes, preparation is key.
> To plan for the upcoming scheduled technical discussion,
> I'd like your input to focus the discussion down to a reasonable scope.
> 
> Regards,
> -- Nicolas.
> 
> 
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
> Topic: Ontologies, reasoning & tagging
> 
> Session moderator: Nicolas Rouquette
> 
> Background:
> 
> 1) OWL is the de-facto common ground for relating external information 
> via tagging to an ontology where ontology-based reasoning has a useful 
> application-specific role.
> 2) Tool support for OWL-based development and reasoning has progressed 
> to the stage where OWL has become a practical technology, almost 
> "off-the-shelf"
> 3) There is plenty of lattitude for applying this technology in a 
> practical sense: this is both promising (e.g., innovative methodologies) 
> and concerning (e.g., project failures)
> 
> Goal: assemble a panel of experts to discuss:
> 
> a) selecting what useful functions can ontology-based reasoning have 
> w.r.t. application-specific issues, questions, problems
> 
> examples:
> 
> a.1) ontology development support
> => reasoning: -- see classification here: 
> http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2004/schedule2.html#thursday
> => tools -- see a list here: http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/#paa
> 
> a.2) semantic query
> => reports, extracting a specific subset of an ontology -- see document 
> generation here: 
> http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2004/schedule2.html#thursday
> => tools -- see list above
> => query languages & tools
>  comparison: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/pha/rdf-query/
>  the new kid on the block: sparql
>  see: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/pha/rdf-query/
>  why should you care? -- see: 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-rules/2005Apr/0001.html
> 
> a.3) validation / verification
> => consistency/integrity checking
> => this is big problem but one that can quickly escalate into fierce 
> arguments --- see: 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-desc/2005Mar/0026.html
>  e.g., is there a sensible strategy to use a (meta) ontology with which 
> one can describe the kind of consistency/validation/... criteria we want 
> a (lower) ontology to have?
> 
> b) handling expressiveness / modeling / representability issues
> 
> => sometimes, OWL isn't enough (because of limited expressiveness) to 
> describe complex important application-specific notions.
>  eg. -- see the session on "biomedical ontologies" here: 
> http://protege.stanford.edu/conference/2004/schedule2.html#thursday
> 
> examples:
> 
> b.1) a possible next step: use an "upper" ontology that is sufficiently 
> expressive to adequately capture such complex application-specific notions.
> 
> => how?
> 
> b.2) annotation strategy
> concern: annotations are currently "ignored" because the meaning of an 
> annotation depends on what annotations are used for and what meaning is 
> assigned to them
> possible strategy: develop an "ontology" that describes the meaning of 
> an annotation
> motivation1: the meaning of an annotation is clear
> motivation2: use the meaning of an annotation to select which 
> annotation(s) are relevant/useful for a specific reasoning purpose
> 
> problems:
> => including an annotation ontology can easily lead to a logical theory 
> that is no longer OWL-DL but OWL-Full
> 
> c) selecting among strategies for capturing application-specific 
> semantics into a useful form for such reasoning functions:
> 
> c.1) tagging application-specific domain concepts & data with 
> ontological annotations
> c.2) splitting the application-specific domain into different ontologies 
> (e.g., separating the simple stuff from the complex stuff)
> c.3) formalizing the complex stuff with a different kind of theory
> 
> => annotation is a common example of a practical strategy (see best 
> practices guidelines for representing classes as property values)
> 
> => is using an "upper" ontology like SUMO, DOLCE or PSL for annotation 
> purposes  a sensible strategy?
> 
> possible motivations:
> 
> * reusing/leveraging high-quality ontologies whose semantics have been 
> carefully and rigorously defined.
> * the reasoning problem involves domain-specific knowledge beyond the 
> scope of the ontology
>    (e.g., planning as a form of application-specific reasoning style in 
> the context of web services
>             
> http://www.daml.org/services/use-cases/language/swsl-usecase/Composition.htm) 
> 
> 
> => the semantics of such "upper" ontologies (e.g. SUMO, DOLCE, PSL) 
> require languages that are more expressive than OWL (e.g., KIF)
>     catch 22: reasoning in the context of expressive ontologies can 
> quickly turn into an excercise in theorem prooving
>     theorem prooving isn't practical in many cases: theorem proovers 
> require a lot of "guidance" from a sufficiently skilled / knowledgeable 
> user
> 
> problems:
> => are there circumstances in which theorem prooving can be reasonably 
> automated w.r.t. ontologies that are formalized in a suitable way?
> 
> alternative strategies without theorem prooving:
> 
> => if reasoning is the means to an end (e.g., answer a question about an 
> ontology, a model built w/ the ontology, ...)
>      can we extract the relevant portion of the ontology that is 
> necessary w.r.t. reasoning about a specific question?
> 
> possible motivation: reasoning w/ the full ontology may be overkill; 
> reasoning w/ the relevant portion of the ontology ought be a simpler and 
> tractable problem
> 
> questions:
> => are there practical strategies for "extracting" a subset of an 
> ontology that is logically relevant & useful w.r.t. a specific reasoning 
> problem?
> 
> 
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
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