OntologDiscussion: Tagging the Ontolog Forum for Matching Interests within Compatible Schedules    (DI9)

Proposed Charter    (DJ7)

Background    (DIB)

Thanks to PeterYim's efforts, the "CIM" collaborative-work-environment ("cwe") is host to many interesting forums that share many viewpoints on the broad topic of "ontology". During a recent conference call, http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_06_23, BrandNiemann reported on a number of potentially very interesting meetings, reviews, conferences where various state-of-the-art techonologies and concepts will be presented and discussed; for example, at the upcoming Extreme Markup conference: http://www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/    (DIC)

This presents a practical dilema for interested members within Ontolog community, the SICoP and other related forums: how much time to spend googling and swoogling (there's such a thing as "Swoogle", a kind of semantic version of google) for references that might lead to useful information. BrandNiemann also reported on recent interest within the CIO council http://www.cio.gov/index.cfm for reverse engineering an ontology directly from software.    (DID)

In the spirit of the cobbler's family having the worst shoes in the community, Ontolog and others involved in the broader context of the "SemanticBlogosphere" lack a practice of using SemanticWeb technology for tagging, annotating, indexing, searching and populating the forums in a way that allows forum practitioners to be the early adopters and early beneficiaries of state-of-the-art advances in semantic web technology.    (DIE)

Within the "SemanticBlogosphere", the genie of semantic tagging and annotation for ontological construction and query/search support is out of the bottle: while wanton ontological extraction is, in some sense, technologically feasible and, in principle, practical with sophisticated tools, it quickly leads to a number of ontology management issues with respect to complex issues of information management, information flow across various forums, heterogeneity from different viewpoints among forum members and the broader public community.    (DIF)

The above issues require addressing the notion of tagging the Ontolog-cwe itself and others in the larger context of integrating multiple sources of semantic information. From the specific charter of Ontolog, such efforts raise further issues of vendor neutrality, openness and practical interoperability among whatever tools and infrastructures involved in migrating, say, the Ontolog wiki to a semantically-enhanced Wiki.    (DIG)

What's next?    (DIH)

First, like any good project, this one would need good requirements. Writing requirements in wiki pages in text would clearly be a sign of severe misery in the OntologForum cobbler's membership.    (DII)

Second, a meaningful discussion about organizing this project would require, at minimum, some kind of informed review of the current available options to decide on a realistic strategy for implementing it.    (DIJ)

There are different strategies possible:    (DIK)

These are but a few options among those discussed in recent conferences, e.g., http://www.dagstuhl.de/04391/Materials/    (DIO)

Incremental approaches    (DIP)

e.g:    (DIQ)

e.g., DC, FOAF, DOAP tagging    (DIU)

Semantic Mining    (DIV)

e.g.:    (DIW)

Transformation    (DIZ)

e.g.: the current OntologForum is viewed as "version 1" of a complex system and we are embarking on building "version 2"    (DJ0)

Comments / Suggestions    (DJ5)