- From: <ewallace@cme.nist.gov>
- Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:25:48 -0400 (EDT)
- To: public-owl-wg@w3.org
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