IAOA ExecutiveCouncil Election 2010

I've been involved in ontologies on and off since 1989, when we started documenting the Penman Upper Model used in the Penman text generation system at ISI in Los Angeles and discussing its potential application as a general domain ontology. Since then I've worked on ontologies in many application areas, focusing increasingly on how to construct modular ontologies that allow accommodation of different, and not necessarily mutually compatible, perspectives on the worlds being modelled. Currently I am involved in ontology construction in several research and development projects spanning natural language processing, spatial cognition, domotics, travel services, geographic information, health services, and assisted living.    (2DOH)

Over this time spent with ontologies I've seen the study and use of ontology come and go in popularity and fashionability. The current high degree of interest comes largely from areas of ontology that are less central to the concerns of the IAOA: that is, lite ontologies with weak axiomatisation that may be built relatively quickly from mass data. Although much can be done with such ontologies, I see these as only scratching the surface of what can and should be done with formal computational ontology. Thus, one of the aims that I believe IAOA should pursue is looking for real use cases where the additional effort and investment that is required for relatively well-formalised detailed ontologies can be shown to pay off. This may well involve combining the work and requirements of diverse communities, and so putting diverse ontologies together will be an important capability. Bringing different areas together and respecting their ontological requirements is then central. I see IAOA as providing an organisational structure within which such interaction can be supported and developed further.    (2DQB)

I also see a role in IAOA as a way of synchronising and strengthening applications for funding. Although there are several efforts currently moving in the direction of trying to build more formal ontologies spanning varieties of domains, many of these remain on a voluntary basis: this situation need to be improved by getting more money flowing into advanced ontology development. For this, we'll need targetted use cases, educational measures, and reliable ontology publicity that unites different groups and approaches. In all these respects, I believe IAOA should adopt a leading and guiding position, bringing together the diversity of participants required to make it work.    (2DQC)

I have been working for the establishment of IAOA because I believe we need to help the ontology community to grow and be recognized as a reference point in research and application. Of course, there are other groups in this research area. IAOA differs because it aims to gather people and to foster activities that focus on ontology content.    (2DOJ)

It takes time to build an association and the first period one has to work on things like organization and procedures, and to publicize the existence of the association itself. I've been working on these aspects in the first year of the IAOA by taking the role of the association secretary.    (2DOK)

From this experience, I believe we need another year to get the association in good shape from the organizational and the formal viewpoint. Overall, I can say we had a good start and I'm ready to help finishing this job.    (2DOL)

In terms of outreach activities, I like to be pragmatic. IAOA relies on voluntary work and, being a young organization, it has to manage the budged with care. In the two coming years I believe the EC should focus on two main issues:    (2DOM)

Within IAOA, I believe the EC should aim to:    (2DOP)

I've been working as an ontologist for 10 years, in R&D and the academy, doing foundational and domain ontology, from the standpoints of philosophy and knowledge representation for knowledge bases and Web applications.    (2DOT)

It is with a disposition that follows from the considerations below that I am proposing to serve the association, presently as part of its executive council.    (2DPN)

At this stage, I see the role of the EC as:    (2DPO)

Credo…    (2DPS)

While the association needs to have a strong identity centred on ontology, it must reflect the fact that ontology is a collaborative cross-disciplinary field that moreover reaches out to varied connected areas of activities.    (2DPT)

The value of the association is in, or will emerge from, the association being a flexible platform for fostering, supporting, and federating thematic interest groups, local chapters, and sporadic initiatives.    (2DPU)

The association is particularly relevant and needed in promoting:    (2DPV)

The International Association of Ontology and its Applications is a unique confluence of disciplines. Herein lies our strength as well as many challenges. Although we are enriched by contributions from areas as diverse as philosophy, computer science, logic, and linguistics, we must also ensure that our field matures into a full-fledged discipline of its own.    (2DQ5)

My research over the past 16 years has focused on the logical foundations of ontology design and analysis and its application to enterprise modelling, manufacturing, web services, and process ontologies. Over this period of time, I have seen the field of applied ontology grow in both technical depth and diversity of applications. Nevertheless, many of our efforts have been hampered by a lack of coordinated efforts of a coherent research community. I believe that the IAOA can assist in establishing the study of applied ontology as a rigorous scientific and engineering discipline by fostering the development of a body of knowledge for the design, evaluation, and implementation of ontologies.    (2DQ6)

To achieve this goal, we must engage the academic and industrial communities to strike a balance between theoretical foundations and real-world applications. As the 2009 Ontology Summit showed, many fruitful interactions can be expected between applied ontology and the standards communities, including such international bodies such as ISO, W3C, and OMG.    (2DQ7)

We also need to engage related research communities, such as the semantic web, knowledge representation, bioinformatics, and e-science. The activities of the IAOA can foster more collaboration and dissemination of research to ensure that contributions to applied ontology are recognized, shared, and reused.    (2DQ8)

I have been involved with all of the Ontology Summits, where I have seen the tremendous benefit of building bridges between communities. The topic of most recent Ontology Summit (Creating the Ontologists of the Future) illustrates the critical role that the IAOA can play in facilitating the development of common ontology curricula for both academic and industrial education.    (2DQ9)

The inauguration of the IAOA is an exciting and challenging time. We have the opportunity to shape the young interdisciplinary research discipline of applied ontology. As a member of the Executive Council of the IAOA, I will work tirelessly to fulfill this vision.    (2DQA)

I discovered the role of interdisciplinarity in computer science around 1988, while, as a biomedical engineer, I was striving with representing medical knowledge. Stimulated by John Sowa's first book, I had the chance to start frequenting the local circle of analytic philosophy at Padua University, and slowly a whole new world opened to me. The key to formal ontology where the seminal works by Peter Simons and Barry Smith. In the States, people had just started talking of ontologies for knowledge sharing and reuse, and I realized that formal ontology was the right way to approach those problems, helping people (not just computers) to make explicit their conceptualizations. In the same period I also discovered the importance of linguistic analysis in KR, thanks to the work of Reind van der Riet, Jerry Hobbs, and James Pustejovsky. In 1993 I organised in Padua (with Roberto Poli) the first International Workshop on Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation, which had a strong impact on a large interdisciplinary community.    (2DOX)

After some passionate years spent discussing the role of ontologies mainly with the knowledge acquisition and KR communities, in 1998 we had the first FOIS conference, which paved the establishment of a new community and an interdisciplinary area of research: Applied Ontology. The sabbatical spent by Chris Welty in my lab in Padova alllowed us to “popularize” the first technical results of our formal approach through the OntoClean methodology, and the move to Trento in 2003, to found the new Lab for Applied Ontology, allowed me to set up the small, beautiful group of people which produced the DOLCE foundational ontology, one of our best known results.    (2DQD)

Thanks to a brilliant intuition from IOS Press, the community got its own journal in 2004. Since then, the idea of establishing an international association has been in the air for a while. When we finally decided to go for it, my major preoccupation was to make sure to guarantee a truly democratic and open process, giving everybody a chance to participate and to construct our association "from the bottom". Well, the bootstrap process hasn't been that simple, but we now have it!    (2DQE)

For the future, I must say I am still willing to continue spending my energy in this initiative for one year or two, but then it will be time to step back and let others bring their contributions.    (2DQF)

In conclusion (using the words we used for the ESF proposal), I believe IAOA distinguishes itself from other initiatives (mainly focusing on technological aspects) for its explicit interdisciplinary character and its openness towards researchers, students and professionals worldwide. My wish is to establish an active scientific community bridging together three broad categories of people:    (2DQG)

I am convinced that the cross-fertilization of the above communities is absolutely necessary, and could well lead to the emergence of an entirely new discipline.    (2DQK)

As a member of the Executive Council, I would like to work to advance our discipline along the following four lines of action:    (2DOZ)

First, I would like to contribute to promote the systematization and dissemination of a Body of Knowledge for Applied Ontology and Ontology Engineering, in the lines of what has been achieved in disciplines such as, for instance, Software Engineering (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok).    (2DPC)

Second, I would like to contribute to promote a methodical analysis of our current Body of Knowledge to identify important knowledge gaps. With the results of this analysis, we could systematically support scientific venues aimed at addressing these gaps.    (2DPD)

Third, I would like to contribute to the true internationalization of the association and to the expansion of its presence and relevance to national communities. As the maturity of the area increases, Ontology Engineering should be more and more discussed in a level of undergraduate education as well in industrial and government settings. Especially in these scenarios, local representations of the association (e.g., national chapters) could play a fundamental role in promoting events, producing literature and adapting education to peculiarities and challenges of these particularized environments.    (2DPE)

Finally, in order to promote interdisciplinary research, the association should be truly interdisciplinary. Thus, I would like to contribute to the dissemination of ontological research and education to areas in which ontology can have a great impact. In particular, I would like to continue to promote formal ontology in the areas of Conceptual Modeling, Databases, Information Systems and Software Engineering.    (2DPF)

I have joined the IAOA to contribute to the further development of applied ontology as a scientific discipline. Applied ontology is a young area of research, and its methods are still under development. Any area of research requires methods for evaluating its progress. Although some methods, such as OntoClean, have been developed to evaluate ontologies and their internal structure, I believe we still lack commonly accepted criteria to evaluate the success of ontological engineering efforts. We as a community are in the position to make progress towards establishing these criteria, which would, ideally, lead to a means for empirically evaluating ontologies. This is an important step towards further establishing applied ontology as a scientific discipline. I would like to promote discussion of these efforts within the IAOA.    (2DP1)

Another important aspect will be the creation of an educational resource for applied ontology, which can guide students and researchers through various problems in formal and applied ontology. I believe that this resource should be developed in an open form by the community, similar to the Ontogenesis effort (http://ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org/). Ontogenesis aims to create an open educational resource for biomedical ontology and knowledge representation in the form of a collection of Blog articles which are all peer-reviewed. Creating a resource for applied ontology will require the collaboration of logicians, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists and domain experts. Therefore, the IAOA is in a priviledged position to create such a resource. I would like to encourage participation in open projects such as Ontogenesis or the Ontolog Forum.    (2DPI)

Being a young researcher myself, I would like to promote activities towards the support of students in applied ontologies. One form could be the organization of a doctoral consortium at conferences such as FOIS, where students can get advise on their research by experienced scientists.    (2DPJ)

I have been working on ontological engineering for more than 15 years. My first ontology paper is published in 1992 at JKAW (Japanese KA Workshop). Since then, I have been investigating task ontology which I coined, role theory, function ontology, upper ontology (YAMATO), ontology building tool (Hozo) and functional-model description tool as well as building fundamental ontologies such as clinical ontology, ontology of learning/instructional theories and so on with serious applications. For example, SOFAST, a functional-model description tool developed jointly by my colleagues, has been deployed in industries.    (2DP3)

Unfortunately, I understand Asia is not active in ontology research. In order to make IAOA a real international society on ontology and its application, I believe I can contribute to disseminating IAOA activities not only in Western world but in Asia. On the basis of my past and current research experiences, I'd like to support dissemination of ontology research activity into Asia by playing the role of a bridging person between these two worlds.    (2DPL)

Fortunately, I have a reasonable amount of experience in collaborating with industries and organizing conferences as well as doing academic research, I am willing to contribute to establishing ontology research and its application as a new discipline.    (2DPM)

I have worked to support the development of ontological engineering and science since its origins in the early-mid 1990s. I’ve addressed the adoption of these technologies on three fronts:    (2DQL)

I pledge to continue this work across many fronts, and will additionally support outreach within IAOA to establish national chapters in developing and non-Western countries, and support the promotion of efforts to include more women in IAOA and ontology technologies. Although IAOA is a young organization, we need to act forcefully, set guidelines, promote good practices, publicly advocate sound ontology technologies and their incorporation into mainstream educational instruction and computational practice, and expand our efforts in influencing commercial and governmental information technology.    (2DPK)

I'm a computational biologist and ontologist, using ontologies for science and working through consequences that follow from such use - technical, social, and legal. I work as Principal Scientist at Science Commons, with recent appointment as Director of Clinical Data Exchange at the University of Buffalo. Over the past years I have been involved with community efforts, co-chairing the OWL 2 Working Group and serving as coordinating editor of the OBO Foundry, and serving as a task force lead for the INCF Program for Ontologies of Neural Structures.    (2DP7)

I will bring novel perspectives, based on this experience, to complement the IAOA executive board. Specifically:    (2DQS)

Legal aspects of ontology reuse: Ontologies are copyrightable, and without explicit permissions, subject to rather draconian restrictions on reuse. What licensing strategies should be used to permit the sorts of reuse members want?    (2DQT)

Social processes by which ontologies are built and adopted: I work in a number of collaborative ontology development efforts. Working with large groups of people is always challenging - what can we learn and share about making such collaborations successful?    (2DQU)

Standardization efforts: We're moving from a situation in which ontology development and reuse was only via non-interoperable systems, to one in which it is more likely we can share our work using standard components. How can we further and influence this process?    (2DQV)

Engagement with semantic web researchers on use of ontology: Ontology is an enabling component for the development of a Semantic Web. How can we engage the various communities in this effort?    (2DQW)

In the past year, I was part of the Transitory Executive Council. It was good to participate in this collective process and see our joined creative energies turning into a new social entity. I am presenting myself because I believe the association requires prolongated efforts to become solid enough and thriving.    (2DP9)

The challenge is that the community still needs to be shaped in order to be recognized by its own members and by the rest of the academic world. Our difficulty, but our strength too, is that we are stemming from many disciplines and have a large variety of views. Truly interdisciplinary research is particularly difficult to establish, so as to, e.g., appear as such in education and curricula or have its own Special Interest Groups structured around distinctive research topics (and not simply imported from the original disciplines nor from application areas). The vision is that IAOA be the place to help coordinate and develop the many initiatives of our community, some already existing and others requiring IAOA's support to happen. I'd like to continue helping this to be.    (2DQO)

In this year, besides being active in the collective decisions of the EC, I have played the role of treasurer of IAOA. This means I learned a lot about the Italian fiscal and banking systems and on developing joining forms (but also that I was thrilled to see the first registrations come in and recently pass the 100 line). This administrative matter is the boring side of the expertise I'm offering you. On the other hand, I have the experience of 20 years of interdisciplinary research, one foot in logic-based knowledge representation, the other in formal semantics in linguistics. The common ground was my focus on ontology from the start, when it was not yet a topic line in computer science conferences.    (2DQP)

I would like to start by declaring that I am dedicated to helping establish "Ontology and its Applications" as a professional discipline, and to move the adoption of that into the mainstream. I truly believe in the strategic importance of "Ontology" work, and see it as a key enabler to the next level of "computing" and "human-machine" capabilities.    (2DPB)

As an advocate for "open technology" and "open knowledge," I assert that the fundamental research and development work in Ontology need to be kept "open" and to be accessible to all. Therefore, I support open collaboration as a means for our community to bootstrap our collective intelligence towards advancing this field. To help achieve that, I see the need for both an informal community of practice (a model we are using at ONTOLOG <http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki>) as well as a formally established professional society (as in IEEE, ACM, etc.), which I hope we can jointly build IAOA into.    (2DPG)

It has been an honor and a privilege for me to work as part of the Transitional IAOA Executive Council to help get the Association established. I shall continue to dedicate myself and devote my energies into advancing the abovementioned agenda, along with those adopted by IAOA's Executive Council and Membership-at-large if I do get elected into the next IAOA-EC.    (2DPH)