OntologySummit2009 StandardsCommunityPerspectives

OntologySummit2009: Perspectives from the Standards Community    (1TT5)

Lead Editor: HowardMason    (1TT6)

Purpose:    (1TTI)

• To identify ways in which ontology could help in standards development and exploitation    (1TTJ)

Scope:    (1TTK)

• The scope of this activity covers any aspect in which ontology can assist the standards community, such as to:    (1VA0)
  • develop new or improved standards using ontological techniques to for example reduce ambiguity, increase precision    (1VA1)
  • represent existing bodies of knowledge in the form of standards in electronically implementable forms    (1VA2)
  • use ontological techniques to support integration across multiple standards - such as integration of viewpoints of components of manufacturing systems    (1VA7)
  • use ontologies to help end users and implementors to better understand the standards and how they interoperate    (1VA3)

    (1TTL)

Content:    (1TTM)

This section gives some fundamental reminders about standards. It is followed by contributed ideas and suggestions    (1VB0)

• What is a standard?    (1VB8)

A standard is nothing more than an agreement across a particular community of interest, to achieve mutual benefit, based on the best available knowledge and technology. Implementation is voluntary, unless mandated by legal or commercial constraints.    (1VB1)

• The Standards process    (1VAO)
  • ISO standards are developed according to the following principles - similar principles apply in other organisations    (1VAP)
    • Consensus - The views of all interests are taken into account: manufacturers, vendors and users, consumer groups, testing laboratories, governments, engineering professions and research organizations.    (1VAR)
    • Industry wide - Global solutions to satisfy industries and customers worldwide.    (1VAS)
    • Voluntary - International standardization is market driven and therefore based on voluntary involvement of all interests in the market-place.    (1VAT)
  • There are three main phases in the ISO standards development process as follows. The member bodies here represent their national industries and interests    (1VAU)
    • The need for a standard is usually expressed by an industry sector, which communicates this need to a national member body. The latter proposes the new work item to ISO as a whole. Once the need for an International Standard has been recognized and formally agreed, the first phase involves definition of the technical scope of the future standard. This phase is usually carried out in working groups which comprise technical experts from countries interested in the subject matter.    (1VAW)
    • Once agreement has been reached on which technical aspects are to be covered in the standard, a second phase is entered during which countries negotiate the detailed specifications within the standard. This is the consensus-building phase.    (1VAX)
    • The final phase comprises the formal approval of the resulting draft International Standard (the acceptance criteria stipulate approval by two-thirds of the ISO members that have participated actively in the standards development process, and approval by 75% of all members that vote), following which the agreed text is published as an ISO International Standard.    (1VAY)
• Standards opportunities    (1VAK)
  • There are a number of classes of standard that should be able to benefit from ontologies    (1VB2)
    • Many standards comprise lists of permissible values and their explanation, such as lists of country codes, or currency codes. We need to build on such reference data.    (1VB3)
    • A large proportion of the world's standards provide the definition of characteristics of products, such as a bolt with permissible lengths, diameters, materials and strength. From an information point of view, this covers two aspects - the relationship of the set of characteristics to the product, and the permissible values of those characteristics. Such a structure can be represented in a variety of ways - how can ontology help?    (1VB4)
    • Information models define entities, by their attributes and relationships and rules, which can be instantiated into representations of objects by applying values to the attributes of the entities. Typically these include product models    (1VB5)
    • Management standards define processes and compliance requirements - I have no idea how these can benefit from ontology.    (1VB6)
  • The old joke about "the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from" is a sad consequence of people generating documents without looking at what is already available. However, the large number of standards makes that search more difficult. We need to maintain a way of identifying common concepts and relationships between standards.    (1VB7)

The following ideas or misunderstandings have been contributed    (1VAL)

• Standard identity for shared objects    (1TU8)

Many objects end up being identified multiple times in different standards. For example, units of measure are given different identities in various standards, and there are known to be two initiatives to give URI identifiers to them currently in progress. What is really needed is that the authoritative source (in this case the BIPM or ISO TC12) that should provide the URIs for all to just use.    (1TU9)

• Rules in standards    (1TUA)

Many standards include rules, e.g. conformance classes that determine whether an implementation is conformant. In natural language it is always difficult to avoid ambiguity. This can be reduced by stating the the rules in logical form.    (1TT7)

• Native file formats with standard meta-data - especially for engineering analysis    (1V7B)

The traditional approach to standardisation has been to replace native file formats with standard ones. This approach is not always the best one, because native file formats can be more concise and efficient and can have features which are not yet within the scope of standardization.    (1V7C)

In engineering analysis, system vendors define very effective formats for representing fields using meshes. Often there is little benefit in defining an equivalent standard format. However, within a standard file format there is precise meta-data about what the field is, i.e. the variable, the coordinate system, the units of measure, the region within which it exists, and the state for which it exists.    (1V7D)

Some of this meta-data may be contained within a native file format, but it is often incomplete. Also whereas a representation of a field is accessed by very few systems, perhaps only the system that created it, the meta-data is accessed by very many.    (1V7J)

A simulation data management system may be concerned with information about a field such as:    (1V7K)

A simulation data management system may reference a native file that provides a description of the field, and specify the activity that created the description (e.g. an analysis or wind tunnel test).    (1V7P)

This approach requires standard engineering analysis meta-data which can be used along side native file formats. Standards such as ISO 10303-104 "Finite element analysis" have defined many of the meta-data concepts, but the current standards only allow these concepts to be used within a standard file format. An ontology derived from ISO 10303-104 would enable these concepts to be used to provide information about files in a native format.    (1V7Q)

Alongside an ontology of standard concepts, an ontology of analysis file types is also require so that the format of a native file, which is used to provide a description of a field, can be stated unambiguously.    (1V7U)

The NAFEMS CAD-FE Working Group intends to:    (1V81)

    (1V7E)

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 This page is maintained by HowardMason ... please contact him if there is any question.    (1TT8)