[ontology-summit] Making the Summit Accessible

[Ali Hashemi <ali@xxxxxxxxx>]

beyond the conclusion of the face-to-face meetings.

As a follow up to yesterday's conference call (http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2011_05_19), I think we agreed on the need for developing something more than a Communique. We need to present the culmination of the summit (Communique + Tracks + Wiki content) in a more effective manner.

Specifically, if we're considering putting the creation of a website as an additional explicit goal of the outcome of future summits, then I think we have one of two choices:

1. One central site that contains each year
2. One site for each year (i.e. how academic conferences usually collect material)

I think the first one makes more sense, as it provides a more unified view of the progress of ontology and the summits. My personal experience with conference websites (say for IJCAI) is that each year differs highly in quality, they are not presented in a consistent way, and are generally a frustrating way to keep track of conferences over a long period of time.

Beyond the above consideration, I would suggest that the purpose of each site should be to support the theme of the summit and mediate the relation to resources developed over the course of the summit in a more accessible manner.

I'll use the 2011 Making the Case Summit to illustrate what I mean by the above statement.

In this case, we identified a number of tracks tackling different aspects of one problem -- how to construct a compelling, persuasive argument re ontologies. In the course of this process, we collected, developed and are ultimately providing the material for ontology evangelists to make actual cases. Not only that, but the resources we provide include identifying a set of target audiences and broad strategies that evangelists might actually employ.

!!

The fact that an ontology evangelist would use the output of the summit to make a case should drive our organization and access to the collected and developed material. That is how a site would support the theme of this year's summit.

To briefly recap, 

• We identified a number of different audiences
• who care about a number of different metrics
• We identified a set of benefits that ontology can provide 
• with corersponding metrics
• We solicited and collected a number of use cases
• where presumably, ontology actually delivered those benefits
• and it is expressible via the metrics.

Remembering why an evangelist would be accessing the communique in the first place, this suggests a natural layout... Just to be explicit, an ontology evangelist wants to persuade at least the audiences we identified (+perhaps others that we missed) using at least the resources we provided. So given their audience, they’re interested in only a subset of the benefits, metrics and use cases at any one time. Moreover it would be useful for them to see which use cases and value metrics apply to which audience member.

So... We should capture these relations in our content, and provide views into the summit web site according to the evangelist's target audience.

(Evangelist (wants_to) convince TargetAudience)

(TargetAudiences value Benefits)

(TargetAudiences respond_to Metrics)

(Metrics measure Benefits)

(UseCases deliver Benefits)

The ValueMetrics Synthesis ( http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OntologySummit2011_ValueMetrics_Synthesis ) already largely captures the mapping between the UseCases and both Benefits and Metrics.

As Michael Uschold noted in today’s meeting, we should be able to develop an ontolgoy for the usage framework. I believe it is also possible to connect that with the value metrics, and finally connect that to the target audience to create a tight loop to drive the development of our web effort.

What we need to do is make these relations a bit more formal (and perhaps machine readable)!  And also, clearly articulate which Benefits and which ValueMetrics correspond to which TargetAudience. Machine readable representations are particularly desirably if we want to grow the usage example collection and provide dynamic views of our resources to the users.

With such a structure in place, we can then develop a site that better corresponds to evangelist needs. Though of course, it would also be useful to have a presentation scheme that presents the story of the evolution of the summit as well.

Are there any volunteers? Might someone in the ValueSynthesis track be able to extract the relevant bits of the matrix in some formalism? Can we agree on a vocabulary for audience, benefits, metrics and use case types in a machine readable way? <-- This is already informally done in the communique+tracks to some degree. The results of this analysis will at the very least drive the layout of the pages+views, and perhaps facilitate the technology implementation for the delivery of "nuggets" of content that we'll be hosting. We can discuss what a "nugget" of content means for this summit...

Best,

Ali

-- 


(•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,., 

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