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To: |
<gruninger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <guarino@xxxxxxxxxx>, <matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx>, <gangemi@xxxxxxx>, <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx>, <bateman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <doug@xxxxxxx>, <apease@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <andersen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <dieter.fensel@xxxxxxxx>, <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>, "'Mark Musen'" <musen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Schoening, James R CECOM DCSC4I" <James.Schoening@xxxxxxxxxxx>, "Uschold, Michael F" <michael.f.uschold@xxxxxxxxxx>, <welty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> |
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Cc: |
"'Upper Ontology Summit Organizing Committee'" <uos-org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> |
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From: |
"Steve Ray" <ray@xxxxxxxxxxxx> |
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Date: |
Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:37:03 -0500 |
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Message-id: |
<200602152237.k1FMb3I4029720@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> |
Upper Ontology Summit Panelists and Key Participants: (01)
This note provides additional detail about the coming Upper Ontology
Summit in Gaithersburg, MD, and its rationale. The goals and approach will
ultimately be that decided by the eight invited panelists. The organizing
committee have prepared some starting suggestions. (02)
The two broad goals proposed by the organizing committee are: to find
methods to interrelate existing upper ontologies so as to permit users of
each to reuse knowledge expressed in the others; and to increase public
awareness of the maturity and capabilities of ontology technology for
automating information analysis and exploitation.
Correspondingly, the discussions leading up to the meeting and the meeting
itself will deal with both technical and public-relations issues. The goal
of improving the public perception of the current state and potential for
ontology technologies will be as significant as the technical questions to
be explored. (03)
With respect to the proposals for methods to relate the upper ontologies to
each other, it is understood that substantive efforts would require some new
funding specifically for that purpose. We are hopeful that positive
publicity coming from this Upper Ontology Summit could improve the public
perception of the state and importance of formal ontology development, and
thereby increase the chances that funding could be obtained specifically for
that effort at interrelating the ontologies, as well as for both research on
and commercial development of ontologies related to one or more of the upper
ontologies you represent. We hope that the public communique will express
at least an agreement in principle to work toward some means of relating the
ontologies to each other. (04)
This note describes:
(1) suggested methods for discussion among the UOS panelists prior to the
meetings March 14th and 15th;
(2) The schedule for March 14th and 15th.
(3) A specific proposal for one method to relate the upper ontologies to
each other; this can be discussed and modified, or ignored in favor of
alternative ideas presented by the panelists;
(4) Segments of a sample communique that might be agreed to and made
public at the conclusion of the March 15th meeting. Any part of the
sample may be adopted, changed, or discarded by the panelists. Other
agreements reached that the panelists would like to announce publicly would
be additionally helpful for creating a positive impression of the maturity
and potential of the field. (05)
In addition to the panelists and organizers, certain "key participants" are
hereby cordially invited to participate in the discussion prior to and at
these meetings. Those key participants are : (06)
Bill Andersen
Dieter Fensel
Chris Menzel
Mark Musen
Jim Schoening
Mike Uschold
Chris Welty (07)
On behalf of the organizing committee, and also from a personal perspective,
I sincerely hope that I will be seeing you here in Gaithersburg in March. (08)
Sincerely, (09)
Steven R. Ray, Moderator of the Upper Ontology Summit
Chief, Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Phone: (301) 975-3524
Fax: (301) 258-9749
Email: ray@xxxxxxxx (010)
------------------------------------------ (011)
(1) Pre-meeting discussion
The panelists, invited key participants and organizers of the
Upper Ontology Summit have been subscribed to an archived mailing list
created specifically for the purpose of discussion among the panelists and
organizers. Do note that this list is configured for posting by the above
groups only, but the archive is viewable by all (to maintain our openness
and transparency of this initiative). Mail for this archived list may be
sent to:
mailto:uos-convene@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (012)
In addition, a public Wiki page has been set up:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UpperOntologySummit (013)
Although this Wiki page is reachable by the public, it has not been
publicized and may be used to present and integrate materials, positions, or
discussions that the Upper Ontology Summit panelists consider relevant to
the meeting goals and wish to share in a unified editable resource. Where
desired, daughter pages can be easily created by using the Wiki
page-creation mechanism (simply adding to the parent document any word in
mixed-case such as SubsetOntology). Patrick Cassidy or Peter Yim will help
anyone unfamiliar with the Wiki environment. (014)
Materials already on that page can de deleted, and alternate pages created
and used by the panelists exclusively, if desired. (015)
(2) Meeting Schedule.
The public section of the Panel discussion will occur from 1 to 5 PM on
Wednesday March 15th 2006. (016)
There will be preparatory meetings on the morning of the 15th and also on
the previous day, Tuesday March 14th. The meetings on the 14th will not be
publicized and will be primarily for the panelists to discuss the public
statement to be made, and any other issues not already resolved via the
e-mail discussions. In addition to the panelists and organizers, several
other individuals will be invited as "key participants". (017)
Tuesday, Mar. 14: A small group consisting of upper ontology custodians,
the invited key participants, and the organizing committee. (018)
8:30 - 10 Introductory session
10:30 - 12 Plenary session of the NIST interoperability event
1 - 5 Main session
Evening: dinner together (no host) (019)
Wednesday, Mar. 15th (020)
Morning session 9 AM -12 noon. In addition to the panelists, organizers,
and key participants, early adopters, potential users and potential funders
of ontology development will be invited to discuss mutual concerns. (021)
Afternoon session 1-5 PM. This would be the "Upper Ontology Summit"
meeting proper. Publicized and open to the public. Members of the public
press will be invited to join us. (022)
(3) One possible goal to be discussed: A Common Subset ontology Compatible
with each of the Upper Ontologies (023)
On the Upper Ontology Summit page:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UpperOntologySummit
. . . there is a straw-man starter proposal to attempt to build a "Common
Subset Ontology", with a structure translatable into each of the linked
fully-axiomatized upper ontologies.
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UpperOntologySummit#nidJF4 (024)
The rationale for this proposal is that a simplified less highly axiomatized
ontology that is compatible with all of the linked upper ontologies can help
to find relations among the upper ontologies while simultaneously providing
guidance to the large community of potential users of upper ontologies. With
sufficient axiomatization to provide precise specifications for the common
concepts of person, organization, time, event, etc., the common subset
ontology can help to introduce those already building simple OWL ontologies
to the need for and possibility of precise logical definitions of the
semantic relations.
By encouraging use and testing of a simplified upper ontology, demand for
the more complete and more functional upper ontologies should follow as a
consequence of improved understanding of the potential.
Allowing users to test their own systems with a simplified ontology that can
be converted into any of the more highly axiomatized ontologies, will reduce
or eliminate the hesitation to spend resources on a technology that may
become rapidly obsolete. What is built with the compatible subset
ontologies will be reusable with each of the linked upper ontologies (025)
The panelists will have the opportunity to discuss the proposal for a common
subset ontology and other methods for relating their ontologies to each
other. (026)
(4) Sample of a possible Communique to be announced on March 15th as a joint
statement by the panelists. (027)
=============================
Sample Communique
============================= (028)
Joint Statement of the Panelists of the Upper Ontology Summit March 15th,
2006 (029)
Background (030)
The science and technology of representing knowledge in a form suitable for
use and reasoning in computers has been developing for over thirty years.
Practitioners in the field have achieved an increasingly detailed
understanding of the fundamental components of meaning and how to represent
them in formats suitable for computer processing. With the success and
expansion of the internet, the potential for creation of a Semantic Web has
become widely recognized, and the number of teams and individuals creating
knowledge classifications of varying degrees of logical formality has
dramatically increased. As this technology develops further it will enable
deployment of computer applications with increasing ability to make reliable
knowledge-based decisions that currently require human effort. Programs
with such enhanced capacity will increase the speed and efficiency of
automated information analysis and exploitation. (031)
Much recent emphasis has been focused on creating common syntactical
formalisms for representing knowledge, but syntactical formalisms alone
do not provide an effective standard of meaning. The complementary
technology for effectively representing the semantic content of complex
widely used concepts is also available, but agreement on a standardized set
of conceptual elements has not yet been reached. The need for such
agreement is increasing rapidly as many isolated projects of varying
complexity have been initiated to capture knowledge in
computer-interpretable formalisms. Without a common resource for
specifying meaning in a uniform fashion, the great potential for sharing
knowledge usable for computer reasoning will not be realized.
A new initiative is needed to find agreement on a set of basic concepts that
can be easily understood and exploited by diverse communities of users to
permit their systems to accurately exchange detailed meanings for the
concepts they need to communicate with each other. (032)
The basis for detailed representation of meaning is now available in several
upper ontologies together with associated mid-level and domain ontologies,
reflecting the results of decades of research and development in knowledge
representation. Each of these ontologies has an existing community of
users. Finding a means to relate these ontologies to each other and to make
them easily usable by other developers of domain ontologies can provide
users with access to the essential common standard of meaning that will
allow accurate interchange of conceptual information among multiple
communities, significantly enhancing the value of the knowledge in each of
the communities whose knowledge bases are linked to the common standard. (033)
Conclusion of the Upper Ontology Summit (034)
The theory and technology of knowledge representation have advanced to a
stage where the concepts that are the meanings of terms can be formally
specified in computer systems with great detail and precision.
To demonstrate the power of the technology and provide benchmarks by which
objective evaluations of alternative methods of representing knowledge can
be tested, it will be helpful to create sophisticated
open-source applications available for public evaluation. Each of
the existing upper ontologies can provide a basis for a standard of meaning
representation, but the details of the representations are sufficiently
different that knowledge in one ontology cannot at present be accurately
translated into another. To ease the creation of applications that can take
advantage of any of the existing upper ontologies, we now want to develop
methods to relate the existing upper ontologies to each other. (035)
We have agreed to take substantive steps toward developing methods to
interrelate the existing upper ontologies to each other. The result
of a successful effort will provide a standard of meaning that will be
freely available and readily adapted as a basis for any domain ontology. It
will enable a high level of interoperability, and a means to develop basic
ontologies that can be incorporated into more functional ontologies using
any of those upper ontologies linked to it. (036)
Conclusion of the Upper Ontology Summit in Brief (037)
(1) We agree that the technology of modeling and representing knowledge has
developed to the point where it is feasible to create knowledge-based
reasoning systems with information analysis and exploitation capabilities
significantly more advanced than traditional systems based on relational
databases and object-oriented programming without semantic interpretation. (038)
(2) Each of the existing upper ontologies differs in specifics of
implementation, but we all agree that use of some formally defined common
upper ontology is essential for semantic interoperability. (039)
(3) Each of the existing upper ontologies has different strengths, and we
believe that the technology will be advanced most rapidly by continuing
exploration of such different approaches, while finding the common elements
that will help users develop applications that can take advantage of any of
the well-structured formal upper ontologies. (040)
(4) We believe that finding methods to relate different upper ontologies to
each other will have near-term practical benefits in enhancing
interoperability of knowledge-based systems, and will also permit more
effective investigation of reasoning methods on large knowledge bases. (041)
(5) As one means of interrelating the existing upper ontologies, we plan to
explore the possibility of creating a common subset ontology that will be
accurately translatable into each of the linked upper ontologies. In
addition to making the existing upper ontologies more easily accessible,
this can provide a simple but powerful tool to allow users to explore
creation of interoperable systems with basic reasoning capability on a pilot
scale. (042)
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