Re: Introductions

Here is my introduction:

I am a member of technical staff within the Manufacturing Systems
Integration Division of the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST --formerly NBS) in the US. As the name of our
division suggests, we work on standards, technologies, test methods,
and tools to aid the manufacturing industry with integration concerns.
Thus we support integration of systems and processes related to
product design, manufacturing engineering, operations (supply chain
and shop floor), and -potentially- repair and disposal.  

We feel that standards supporting these sorts of processes should
define conceptual models and that OWL could be used to describe these
models.  However, the expressiveness of OWL as defined by the current
Recommendation is insufficient in a few key areas.  These areas
include: user defined datatypes (or DataRange), restrictions involving
datatype properties, qualified cardinality restrictions, and support
for hierarchical relations.

* Related work:

My work prior to involvement with semantic technologies had been
in developing protocols, architectures, models and research systems
supporting manufacturing integration.  This included contributing
to manufacturing specific standards developed by ISO, ISA, and OMG.

With respect to Semantic Web related activities:

- I was a member of the original Web Ontology Working Group (though
new to logic languages at the time).

- I spearheaded an effort to create a standard UML-based presentation
syntax for OWL at the OMG.  This became the rather larger effort that
resulted in the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) specification.
This also spawned a new Ontology subgroup at OMG which I now co-chair
with Elisa Kendall.

- I was also member of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment
working group at the W3C where I contributed to documents created by
the Software Engineering Task Force, the Ontology Engineering Patterns
Task Force, and the XML Schema Datatypes Task Force.

- I have generally been promoting the Semantic Web languages and
became involved with the OWLED series in hopes of finding consensus on
extensions to OWL to address the shortcomings that made these
languages a hard sell in my community.  This consensus was achieved at
the first OWLED workshop as evidenced by the enhanced language feature
set agreed to by the users and tool providers gathered there (I found
this pleasantly surprising after what I had seen occur in the WebOnt wg).

* What I expect to get out of this wg:

I expect that this working group will build on the successful first
OWL specification and adapt those original documents to support all
the new features added by the OWL 1.1 proposal.  I expect that any new
aspects, such as MOF metamodels, that may be included in this new
document set will be created or at least vetted by those with
expertise in such languages to insure a high quality. I expect that
the document set output from this effort will be as useful to users of
OWL, such as modelers and sophisticated domain experts, as it will be
for OWL tool implementers.

* What I hope/expect to contribute:

Standards work is an important part of my day job.  I expect/hope to
contribute to the language design, to documenting that design in the
form of a metamodel, and to performing editing tasks such as working
on the successor to the OWL Reference document.

* Plans for F2F1:
As stated in the IRC today, I plan on Attending F2F in Manchester.


-Evan

Evan K. Wallace 
(IRC nickname: ekw)
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
NIST

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 21:26:12 UTC