This is the original draft to the paper entitled "Bootstrapping the Applied Ontology Practice: Ontology communities, then and now" which I (PeterYim) was invited to submit for publication on the 10th Anniversary Issue of the Applied Ontology journal back in late 2015. ... That paper was published, after review and editing, and can be found here or here    (4EXQ)

Bootstrapping the Applied Ontology Practice: Ontology communities, then and now (draft)    (4EXR)

 Peter P. Yim 
 ONTOLOG (a.k.a. "Ontolog Forum") & CIM Engineering (d.b.a. "CIM3") 
 peter.yim[at]cim3.com    (4EXU)

Abstract:    (4EXV)

After more than two decades since the interdisciplinary field of Ontology emerged for information science, it is now poised to make a huge impact. The ontological approach calls for a higher level of abstraction, and promises a more generalized solution. It paves the way for machines to better augment humans, and perform tasks that were too complex for the machine, or the human, alone. Applying Ontology requires a very broad spectrum of disciplines and skills, and is therefore, best tackled, not by individuals, but by communities of people working collaboratively. This position paper attempts to trace the brief history of ontology communities from the author's vantage point, identifying some of the key dates and key players (mostly familiar names, but some unsung heroes as well) that have made things happen for the field of Applied Ontology. Inspired by Doug Engelbart's "bootstrap" strategy, the author has developed and operated (until his recent retirement) a virtual collaborative environment (CIM3.NET) on which some ontology communities (like ONTOLOG and OntologySummit) have thrived. Closing with his first-hand observation that the funding/investment and career opportunities have changed for the better in the past few years, the author reflects briefly upon how the Ontology communities of practice might take "Applied Ontology" towards an even better future for this field, as well as for the world, together.    (4EXW)

Keywords    (4EXX)

ontology, applied ontology, ontology community, applied ontology practice, community of practice, history of ontology community, future of ontology community, bootstrap, collaboration, collaborative work environment.    (4EXY)

0. Introduction    (4EXZ)

The core concepts of ontology and its application have been around for more than 2,300 years. For the purpose of this paper though, we will only look at the development of the field of "Ontology[1]" and "Applied Ontology" since the early 1990's. That was the time when pioneers of this discipline co-opted the term Ontology from Philosophy, for use in Information Systems, Knowledge Engineering and Artificial Intelligence.    (4EY0)

By "Applied Ontology Practice" we shall include the acts of those who profess in the science, engineering, productization and dissemination of Ontology and ontology-based technologies. Therefore, one should expect the members of the community for this practice to include, not only the research and development folks, but also, anyone else who enables the practice - from, say, the policy decision maker who funds the R&D project, to the ontology standard developer, to the educator/trainer who ensures adequate supply of knowledgeable/skilled professionals for the field, the entrepreneurs, and innovators, and the marketing/sales person who makes the market "buy" the ontology-based product or solution, to name a few.    (4EY1)

The author came from vastly different backgrounds than most of the current members in the Ontology community. Before devoting his late career to "applied ontology", he has been in many different fields[F1]. That accounts for perspectives and approaches he has taken that may have been "different," but presumably, that's what made it interesting.    (4EY2)

The common thread that ties him to everyone else in the field is that: he believes "Ontology and Its Applications" is an important pursuit. He believes that Applied Ontology will improve the world for humanity, and is achievable. To him, the ontological approach calls for a higher level of abstraction - in a lot of cases, adding just one more layer of abstraction - and promises a more generalized solution. To him, Ontology paves the way for machines to better augment humans, and perform tasks that were too complex for the machine, or the human, alone. On that believe, he dedicated the last 15 years of his working career to facilitating applied ontology. He has been hosting, supporting, and even co-convening some interesting Ontology communities, collaboration platforms, and projects during that interim.    (4EY3)

1. Ontology and Ontology Communities    (4EY4)

One hears a lot about the roots of today's Ontology concepts ("Formal Ontology," especially) as having come from the likes of Aristotle (384 - 322 BC), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914), or the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951.) We will, however, fast forward to the time when the term "Ontology" (in the sense we are using it in information science today) emerged and started getting adopted. That takes us to the early 1990's (with seminal publications in the 1991 to 1993 time frame and onwards), notably with work by researchers in the US, Italy, UK and Germany. See, for example, one of the early papers from Tom Gruber of the Stanford KSL[2], particularly, the extensive bibliography therein, that will help us identify some of the early pioneers.    (4EY5)

The field of Ontology began, as basic research pursuits, supported by government research funding (from the likes of US DARPA/ARPA, NIH, NSF; ERC and various NRCs in the European Countries), and work was typically carried out at academic and research institutions. Government or corporate funded work created teams and communities, although a lot of those were restricted to participants of those projects or programs. Early community efforts, such as the Knowledge Sharing Effort[3] have been significant to move the field forward too. For this paper, though, we will focus more on the emergent, open, international, community efforts, instead.    (4EY6)

1.1 Year 1993: the First Formal Ontology Workshop    (4EY7)

In the debut presentation of the IAOA[4], Nicola Guarino identified this 1993 workshop as the first among key events that marked the development of Ontology Communities. For the first time, researchers from different countries got together, physically, to have a discourse on Ontology. This was the "International Workshop on Formal Ontology - in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation" that took place on 17-19 March 1993 in Padova, Italy. Collected among the historic artifacts from that workshop[5], the preface outlined a new direction that some among us in the Ontology community have been pursuing since. The contributors of that workshop (ref. the Table of Contents there) also helped identify some of the field's pioneers; a good number of whom are still with us today and are still helping guide our way forward.    (4EY8)

1.2 The Protege Community    (4EY9)

One of the oldest, and the largest of communities in the ontology-related domain is the Protege user community. Protege is an ontology development tool, and a platform for the development of knowledge-based systems and ontology-based solutions. It has its roots in Mark Musen's PhD research work in the 1980's which worked on a domain-specific knowledge-acqusition tool, known as OPAL, to build the complex knowledge bases required in a cancer-chemotherapy advisor called ONCOCIN. That work was completed in the 1987/88 time frame. OPAL and ONCOCIN soon transitioned into Protege-I. The notion of ontology was introduced to the Protege tool (in Protege- II, early 1990's) to provide a more generic, component-based approach that would allow alternative problem-solving methods to be applied to knowledge bases[6].    (4EYA)

As the Protege tool gets adopted, a user community emerged. In this case, the community was created around the too/technology, and serves to foster collaborative research, development, education and user support. When asked when and how did their community get started, Musen recalled, "Four of us met at a bar at a conference in Pavia in 1995, we called it "The first Protege User Workshop. Our e-mail lists started at around the same time too." As of this writing, one can see on the Protege website that the tool has close to 250,000 registered users (with unknown numbers having downloaded the software without registering); they have 3,500 subscribers on the [protege-user] mailing list, as well as more than 18,000 on their announcement list[7].    (4EYB)

1.3 The GO and OBO Communities    (4EYC)

Communities also form around domain-specific Ontologies. The Gene Ontology (GO)[8] community is a case in point. According to Chris Mungall: "The GO community started back in 1998, marked by a commit of GO to the cvs repository. That year also marked the coming together of model organism databases around the initial version of GO that Michael Ashburner and Suzanna Lewis produced." As Mungall points out, the various GO mail lists are primarily for GO Consortium members and people applying GO terms to genes as part of their bio-curation work. While the size of the GO discussion list is under a couple of hundred subscribers, the size of the wider community of users is much larger, as there are hundreds of software applications doing GO- based analyses, and each of these would have its community of users (although those communities are no longer tightly knit.)    (4EYD)

Successful communities also tend to extend themselves in positive ways. As an example, in 2001, Asburner and Lewis started the OBO initiative. They aim to coordinate with other ontology developers for the life sciences so that they would apply the key principles underlying the success of the GO -namely, that ontologies be open, orthogonal, instantiated in a well-specified syntax and designed to share a common space of identifiers[9]. The OBO community thus emerged. As of this writing, 135 ontologies are included in the OBO Foundry (the repository for OBO compliant ontologies,) and their mailing list has more than 300 subscribers.    (4EYE)

1.4 Year 1998: the first FOIS (Formal Ontology in Information Systems) Conference    (4EYF)

Five years after their first international workshop; the Formal Ontology community has gained enough momentum and support to initiate its international conference series. FOIS'98 - the First International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems came together in Trento, Italy, between June 6 to 8, 1998[10]. The FOIS Conferences, provides a platform for Ontology researchers to come together to share their work and research findings. Targeted participation covers diverse domains such as conceptual modeling, database design, software engineering, organizational modeling, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, the life sciences, bioinformatics, geographic information science, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the semantic web, Eight FOIS Conferences[11] have been held since 1998, and is currently held every other year. FOIS'98 marked the beginning of an important collaborative effort of the Formal Ontology community.    (4EYG)

1.5 Year 1998: the Heidelberg Workshop    (4EYH)

Another landmark event for the Ontology community took place during 1998. While unrelated, this event was held in Germany, right after the FOIS Conference in Italy that year. It was the Heidelberg Workshop sponsored by the Klaus Tschira Foundation, and convened at Villa Bosche, Heidelburg, Germany, June 10-16, 1998. It was a first attempt towards some sort of convergence among the Formal Ontology community. The author had only first heard about this from Nicola Guarino when they met at NIST for the Upper Ontology Summit almost eight years later, but had received help from Pat Hayes and John Sowa to piece together some details and artifacts relating to this workshop[12]. They all remembered that it was Robert Spillers (a retired IBM manager) who did most of the organization work to make this event happen. Unfortunately, those in attendance did not arrive at a consensus that was publishable. That said, the mail thread among participants of this workshop ended up starting an informal virtual collaboration of Formal Ontology researchers, and inspired the emergence of the SUO (Standard Upper Ontology) effort in the following years.    (4EYI)

1.6 Year 2000: start of the IEEE:SUO Working Group    (4EYJ)

Inspired by the 1998 Heidelberg workshop and supported by Robert Spillers and others, James Schoening initiated the IEEE P1600.1: Standard Upper Ontology Working Group (SUO WG) effort in June 2000[13] and led that effort for six years. The community worked and thrived on the mailing list hosted by IEEE, and administered by Schoening. The SUO Working Group grew to 88 voting members and logged 25,000 postings. They went as far as shortlisting six candidate Upper Ontologies, but never came to building a consensus on the one Standard Upper Ontology they were out to create. The SUO mailing list, however, set the stage for virtual collaboration among geographically distributed members of the community, and paved the way for some of the same players to collaborate on the Ontolog Forum, after that (Ontolog) community emerged in 2002.    (4EYK)

1.7 Year 2002: The ONTOLOG (a.k.a. Ontolog Forum) Community of Practice came into being    (4EYL)

In 2001, the author was on a OASIS Technical Committee led by Jon Bosak (widely recognized as "the father of XML") developing an XML standard called UBL (Universal Business Language.) The author suggested, then, that UBL be developed as an Ontology. Along with Leo Obrst and other ex-colleagues[F2], a virtual presentation was made in April 2002, a "ubl-ontolog" mailing list was started mid-May, a face-to-face presentation was made in June that year, to make the case to the UBL-TC members. However, two factors made the making the UBL standardization effort take on an Ontology approach problematic: (i) early feedback from the participants indicated more interest in learning about ontologies than applying experience with ontological development, and (ii) tight timetables, deadlines, and priorities within the UBL effort made that inappropriate. To get the sense of urgency across to the team, Jon Bosak said , "if we don't come up with a UBL Invoice Standard next month, another 5 people would have created their own Invoice syntax and vocabulary."Ontology clearly wasn't mature enough to deliver what was needed then. Everyone reached consensus that we should spin the effort off and make it an independent mailing list, which could garner more support from a broader community. Bosak (who was actually a Philosophy major at college) was very supportive, but kept reminding everyone that they should stay pragmatic with the effort, and strive to address application oriented issues - something which the author took to heart. The ONTOLOG community emerged (co-convened by Kurt Conrad, Leo Obrst and Peter Yim) in September 2002. An independent mailing list was created, hosted on CIM3.NET, and an invitation[14] was disseminated to invite participation (at the time, principally) from people in the broader Ontology community, the Standards Development community and the Knowledge Management community. ONTOLOG was envisioned as a Community of Practice (CoP) in the sense John Seely Brown (of the Xerox PARC) would have it: "a small group of people who have worked together over a period of time. Not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorized or identified group. They are peers in the execution of "real work." What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows." There seems to have been a lot of pent up energy for such a community during those early years. Coupled with the support of a virtual Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) which the CIM3.NET infrastructure developed into, ONTOLOG attracted some very talented and dedicated individuals, who pushed it forward with exciting online discussions, virtual activities and projects. The Ontolog community grew into, arguably, the strongest community of its kind (open, international, virtual community of practice devoted to ontology, ontological engineering and semantic technology) and developed processes that were regarded as community best practices, that others were following. With a richer platform for collaboration, some of the discussions that used to take place on the aforementioned SUO WG mailing list gradually migrated over to the [ontolog-forum] list (the discussion list for Ontolog community members.) ONTOLOG also went on to provide the virtual workspace and host other ontology- or ontology-standard related communities and their efforts on its virtual CWE. The CWE also served as the community's Dynamic Knowledge Repository (DKR), amassing a huge body of knowledge as Ontolog members transact to share their expertise and experience. The community has grown from dozens of people back in 2002 to include about a thousand members, and about 3000 subscribers on its event announcement mailing list now. After Peter Yim, who used to run the day-to-day operations of Ontolog, announced (on April 28, 2014,) that he will be phasing into his retirement, a Board of Trustees was formed (on May 22, 2014) to provide leadership, and to administer the transition and the onward operations of ONTOLOG.    (4EYM)

1.8 Year 2006 - the start of the Ontology Summits    (4EYN)

Another landmark event was conceived and co-convened in 2006 by a few of the ONTOLOG members - Patrick Cassidy, Leo Obrst, Steven Ray and Peter Yim. Another attempt was made to bring together upper ontologies gurus. Pat Cassidy suggested that the event be called "Ontology Summit." With the support of Steve Ray, then a division chief at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), ONTOLOG and NIST collaborated in 2006 to put together this Upper Ontology Summit. In the spirit of the Heidelberg Workshop and the SUO Effort, this Summit attempted to get the custodians of the major open upper ontologies to come together and converge on some consensus. A ten-point Joint Communique[15] was released by the eight open upper ontology custodians who were there, which included:    (4EYO)

Not only did this provide a chance for the community to have its top minds spend time together to address an issue that is of tantamount importance to the advancement of the field of Ontology, it also created a platform for the Ontology community to work collaboratively with other related communities to jointly pursue, in depth, the chosen theme for the season. Since then, Ontology Summits have been held each year to explore a theme of choice. The process also matured as time progressed, and this annual program now comprises of almost four months of virtual discourse (over our archived mailing lists) and virtual panel sessions (over augmented conference calls), and culminates in a two-day face-to-face workshop/symposium, during which the community, among other things, will share their findings and present their distilled thoughts in a collaboratively developed communique. Over the ten seasons the Ontology Summit program were produced, themes covered included:    (4EYX)

Co-organizing institutions for the Ontology Summits have also grown to include ONTOLOG, NIST, NCOR, NCBO, IAOA & NCO_NITRD, and at times, institutions and communities relevant to a particular year's theme as well[16].    (4EZ8)

1.9 Year 2009 - International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) was Founded    (4EZ9)

Several participants at the 2006 FOIS Conference (in Baltimore, USA) suggested for consideration, that a formal membership organization be incorporated to advance the field of Ontology. The suggestion was more adequately discussed at the next FOIS Conference (in 2008 at Saarbruecken, Germany) and a consensus was reached that such an endeavor be pursued. The name of "International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA)" was identified, and Nicola Guarino was requested by the community to lead the planning and organization work. IAOA[4][17] was formally established in Trento, Italy on April 29th 2009 (as a non-profit corporation under the law of Italy) with the Mission Statement:    (4EZA)

"The International Association for Ontology and its Applications is a non-profit organization the purpose of which is to promote interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information-systems development, library and information science, scientific research, and semantic technologies in general."    (4EZB)

The leadership of IAOA is provided by an executive Council, with the support of an Advisory Board. IAOA has adopted the FOIS Conference series (started 1998, as described above) as its flagship activity; and made the "Applied Ontology" Journal (which was started in 2005) an affiliated publication. The IAOA President is to co-chair the Ontology Summit each year. It runs a Summer Institute or a Summer School every year; hosts various workshops; operates a range of technical committees and special interest groups (and their respective activities); provides scholarships and other incentives to upcoming scholars in the field; and supports other related professional events.    (4EZC)

1.10 Ontology Standards Communities    (4EZD)

Over the years, many project teams and small communities have formed around the task of ontology-related standards development, and have contributed significantly to the advancement of the field. These groups generally work under the auspices of an SDO (Standards Development Organization) such as ISO, IEC, ITU, IEEE, OASIS, OMG, W3C. Of particular significance are efforts such as:    (4EZE)

... And, of course, many of the W3C relevant semantic web initiatives, such as: RDF, OWL, SPARQL, SWRL, PROV-O, SKOS, Schema.org, or SSN-O efforts.    (4EZH)

2. Behind CIM3.NET    (4EZI)

The notion of a CIM3 system was first introduced by the author in the late-1980/early-1990's[18] while he was still a practitioner in manufacturing. The CIM3 acronym, originally, stood for "Computer Integrated Man-Machine Manufacturing" but has evolved, by the late 1990's, to stand for "Collaboration in huMan-Machine-Methodology." CIM3 is an approach to holistic organizational improvement through extending the traditional "automation system" architecture to incorporate Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) techniques, such as the speech-act based "language/action perspective" in the design of a system[19].    (4EZJ)

The CIM3.NET is a cloud computing infrastructure, designed and implemented by the author and his colleagues on the [cwe-dev] team, to provide Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) support and services to virtual communities. A prototype system of this kind was first implemented, presented, and employed at the Doug Engelbart Colloquium held at Stanford (Jan-Mar, 2000)[20], which the author co-organized, when he was, then, a Staff Advisor at Engelbart's Bootstrap Institute. Features of such a system (with enhancements from Adam Cheyer) were also implemented for company internal collaboration purposes, during the author's next stint at VerticalNet. After VerticalNet went under as a result of the dot-com bust, and the 2001 9/11 attack, the author made the CIM3.NET available for business and government clients, as well as a (mostly) pro bono service to the ontology community.    (4EZK)

The CIM3.NET architecture was inspired by Doug Engelbart's vision on how humanity may be able to tackle her urgent and complex problems through the "Bootstrap" strategy[21]. Engelbart purports that an infrastructure that could foster the co-evolution of human capabilities and tools capabilities is desirable. In a networked improvement community (NIC) setting, one might boost the performance and Collective IQ of the individuals and organizations involved[22]. By improving on the ability to improve, the bootstrap approach would effectively allow the human-machine system to improve exponentially, and hence, effectively allowing us to cope with the unavoidable exponential growth in the changes and their complexities that are happening around us. Engelbart's quest and approach has remained a key influence in the author's work. Besides those on the CIM3 [cwe-dev] team, colleagues that are inspired by Engelbart's vision include folks such as Alan Kay, Terry Winograd, Tom Gruber, Stefan Decker and Adam Cheyer. In particular, Engelbart encouraged everyone to identify an "improvement vector" he or she deems most important, and work on it with the bootstrap approach. Some time in the year 2000, the author came to the conclusion that "Ontology" would be the single most effective piece of the puzzle that would enable how machines can augment the humans, and so he decided to pick "Ontology" as his improvement vector. That choice motivated what followed in his pursuit to help advance Ontology (in whatever way he can contribute) in the ensuring 15 years. During that period, the author leveraged the CIM3.NET infrastructure, as well as his own technical, operations and management skills to support ontology- related (and knowledge-related) communities[F3] and helped them advance their causes.    (4EZL)

3. Where Are We Heading?    (4EZN)

Whether or not people are consciously aware that the "bootstrap" strategy is at play, open communities collaborating in cyberspace did end up performing (at least, anecdotally) more effectively than those operating in more traditional (non-open, non-networked, non-coevolutionary) settings. The phenomena brought about by the integrated circuits, or the Internet, are cases in point. The author expects the improvements that may be brought about by "Applied Ontology" in the future to be equally drastic.    (4EZO)

In the last few years, we have had our share of poster success stories - in projects like: Apple's acquisition of Siri (an ontology-based mobile app) for hundreds of millions of dollars (Apr-2010), or the IBM Watson computer prevailing over its human counterparts on National TV in the game of "Jeopardy" (Feb-2011), or announcement that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex are teaming up to develop Schema.org (Jun-2011), or the launch of Google Knowledge Graph (May-2012.)    (4EZP)

Over the last couple of years, we kept seeing headlines like:    (4EZQ)

"IBM announced plans to invest $1 billion to begin a separate business unit around its super-computer Watson, with $100 million earmarked for venture investment,"    (4EZR)

"Artificial Intelligence Startups See 302% Funding Jump in 2014!"    (4EZS)

"AI Startup Sentient Technologies emerged with $103.5 million in a new series C round of funding,"    (4EZT)

"Google Acquires London-based AI Startup, DeepMind, for more than $400 Million,"    (4EZU)

"Car companies are scrambling for AI talent as Google and Apple’s driverless cars loom,"    (4EZV)

"Toyota plans to spend at least $1 billion on a Silicon Valley research center to study autonomous driving and robotics."    (4EZW)

We have also been hearing about career moves of familiar names in the community, such as:    (4EZX)

"David Ferrucci (who led the work on the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and the IBM Watson "Jeopardy" computer which leveraged that) now leads the AI team at hedge fund giants Bridgewater Associates and Renaissance Technologies;"    (4EZY)

"Bill Andersen (who, previously, founded Ontology Works/ High Fleet) has moved to New York to take on the role of VP of Data Architecture and Senior Engineer at Goldman Sachs;"    (4EZZ)

we've heard that "Natasha Noy has joined Google in Mountain View, California," or that "Chris Welty has joined Google in New York;" and that    (4F00)

Adam Cheyer (who co-founded Siri) has moved on to co-found Sentient Technologies, and he has also been focused on the 'stealth' startup, Viv Labs.''    (4F01)

The trend is unmistakable: collectively, we have been doing something right. "Applied Ontology" has turned the corner, and we are seeing very exciting times in front of us (the "Applied Ontology" practitioner,) both in the availability of funding/investment opportunities, as well as in career opportunities, These are the kinds of opportunities that we weren't able to see, just, say, six years ago!    (4F02)

Of course, "Applied Ontology" is but one sub-discipline within the broader scope of the "Artificial Intelligence" moniker, which people were making the above headlines for. We know, though, at the end of the day, all these AI technologies - whether they be machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, reasoning, planning - will end up finding their way into the hybrid solutions needed for our typical "complex" real live problems. Applied Ontology will, for sure, be there, in some of those solutions.    (4F03)

Can the Ontology community leverage what they have built in the last 20~25 years, and capitalize on the available opportunities to deliver a meaningful and lasting impact? The author believes the answer is a resounding "Yes!" and that eventuality will be unavoidable.    (4F04)

We might be able to consciously speed things up, for Applied Ontology to make a stronger impact, by addressing some of the challenges that face us today:    (4F05)

In short, the opportunities we have been waiting for are finally here, let us keep up the good work, and make "Applied Ontology" deliver.    (4F0A)

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------    (4F2C)

Acknowledgements    (4F0B)

The author is indebted to the following people:    (4F0C)

References    (4F1H)

[1] Bodenreider, O., Olken, F., et al. (2007). The Communique from Ontology Summit 2007 "Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions" - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/OntologySummit2007_Communique - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1I)

[2] Gruber, T. (1993). "Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing" - see: http://tomgruber.org/writing/onto-design.pdf - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1J)

[3] "The Knowledge Sharing Effort" - see: http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/knowledgesharing/ papers/kse-overview.html - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1K)

[4] Guarino, N., Yim, P., Galton, A., Vieu, L., Obrst, L., Gruninger, M., Buitelaar, P., Bateman, J. (2009). "The International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) - Ontolog virtual panel presentation, 18-Jun-2009 - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl? ConferenceCall_2009_06_18 and, in particular, slide #4 on http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/IAOA_20090618/IAOApresentation_ 20090618.pdf - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1L)

[5] Guarino, N., Poli, R., et al. (1993). "International Workshop on Formal Ontology - in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation" Preface and Table of Contents from the Proceedings - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/historic-archives/FOIS-community/International-FormalOntology-Workshop_Padova-It_1993-03.pdf - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1M)

[6] Musen, M., et al. (2015). "The Protege Project: A Look Back and a Look Forward" AI Matters, Volume 1, Issue 4 (June 2015)    (4F1N)

[7] The Protege website: community page - see: http://protege.stanford.edu/community.php - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1O)

[8] The Gene Ontology Consortium website - see: http://www.geneontology.org/ - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1P)

[9] Smith, B., Ashbrner, M., Lewis, S., et al. (2007). "The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration" Nature Biotechnology 25, 1251 - 1255 (2007) - http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n11/full/nbt1346.html - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1Q)

[10] Guarino, N. (1998). "Formal Ontology and Information Systems" - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/historic-archives/FOIS-community/Guarino98_Formal-Ontology-and-Information-Systems_FOIS-1998_NicolaGuarino_19980606to08.pdf ; http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/historic-archives/FOIS-community/FOIS-98.html and other historic artifacts of the FOIS community, under: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/historic-archives/ FOIS-community/ - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1R)

[11] The International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) Conference Series - see: http://iaoa.org/fois/ - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1S)

[12] Collection of artifacts relating to the "1998 Heidelberg Workshop" which included the author's notes, Pat Hayes' collection of the related email messages exchanged, and a brief first-person account about the event by John Sowa - see under: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/historic-archives/ Heidelburg-workshop_1998/ - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015. [Ontolog member credentials required for access; contact author if there is any question.]    (4F1T)

[13] Collection of artifacts relating to the "IEEE P1600.1: Standard Upper Ontology Working Group (SUO WG) Effort" which included the author's notes, a brief first-person account by James Schoening, and the 2001 IJCAI Paper "Origins of the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology" by Ian Niles and Adam Pease - see under: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/historic-archives/IEEE-SUOWG/ - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015. [Ontolog member credentials required for access; contact author if there is any question.]    (4F1U)

[14] Conrad, K., Obrst, L., Yim, P. (2002). "Ontolog Invitation Letter" - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2002-09/msg00000.html and the homepage for the ONTOLOG community's Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) at: http://ontolog.cim3.net - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1V)

[15] Bateman, J., Gangemi, A., Gruninger, M., Guarino, N., Lenat, D., Pease, A., Smith, B., West, M. (2006). "Joint Communique of the 2006 Upper Ontology Summit" - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/UpperOntologySummit/UosJointCommunique - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1W)

[16] The "Ontology Summit" Program (2006 to the present) - see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgibin/ wiki.pl?OntologySummit - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1X)

[17] "The International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA)" (2009 to present) - ref. their website at: http://iaoa.org - last accessed: Nov. 16 2015.    (4F1Y)

[18] Yim, P. (1991). "CIM3: Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems - An Introduction." Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Singapore, October 2-4, 1991 - http://www.cim3.com/whitepaper/cim3_1a1.htm - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F1Z)

[19] Winograd, T., Nancy Newman, N., Yim, P. (1991). "Including people in computer integrated manufacturing design." Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Singapore, October 2-4, 1991 - http://www.cim3.com/whitepaper/lapcim1a.htm - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F20)

[20] Engelbart, D. et al. (2000). "The Doug Engelbart Colloquium at Stanford: An In-Depth Look at "The Unfinished Revolution" (UnRev-II)" - http://dougengelbart.org/colloquium/sessions.html - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F21)

[21] Engelbart, D., et. al. (1999). "The Bootstrap Vision and Mission Statements" - http://bootstrap.cim3.net/vision_mission.html - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F22)

[22] Engelbart, D., et. al. (1992). "Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware" (AUGMENT,132811,) - http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-132811.html - last accessed: Nov. 16, 2015.    (4F23)

Footnotes    (4F24)

[F1] ref. "About the Author" at the bottom of this paper.    (4F25)

[F2] These were his ex-colleagues from VerticalNet (a company that was among the first to employ an Ontology approach in Business-to-Business eCommerce applications.) They included AdamCheyer (who used to run Software Engineering), JackPark (a senior software engineer), LeoObrst (who used to run Ontology Engineering) and PeterYim (who used to run Program Management) at that company. After they all left VerticalNet (which went bust during the burst of 2000 dot-com bubble) they started a side-project called "SOUL" - an acronym for "Semantics, Ontology and Universal Language" - which was behind the push to get UBL adopt an Ontology approach.    (4F26)

[F3] Ontology-related communities and projects that were hosted/supported on CIM3.NET over the years included: UBL, ONTOLOG, OOR, OOR-IPR, Protege-wiki & old-release repository, CODS, SUMO, OKMDS, DAO, IAOA, CLv2, OntoIOp, SOCoP, OntologySummit, OntologyBasedStandards, UoM, SemanticWiki, RulesReasoningLP, EarthScienceOntolog, DAO; as well as more knowledge/collaboration driven ones, like: eGov-CWE, NIST-Interop, KMatKent, Bootstrap, CHM, MP, SOFI, etc. Refer to the Acknowledgement section to see what these acronyms stand for, and who else were involved (with the author) on these projects or communities.    (4EZM)

About the Author:    (4F27)

Peter P. Yim (ref. http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/PeterYim ) is a co-founder of the ONTOLOG community and the CEO of CIM Engineering (dba. "CIM3"). While he has dedicated 15 years of his late career to supporting and advancing Ontology and the Applied Ontology practice, he came from very different backgrounds compared to what one would expect from a typical Ontology Community member. Some of the very diverse fields that the author has previously professed in, include mathematical modeling, (analog and digital) electronic design, manufacturing, software engineering, system integration, professional services, management, future studies, technology policy, IT infrastructure, and collaboration technology. He also has more than a passing interest in history, philosophy, psychology , photography, violin music and vintage watches.    (4F28)