Re: [OEP,ALL] Potential topics for OEP notes

I also agree that all of these would be useful and also that we will 
want to prioritize.

I met in person or discussed the issue in email with a few people in the 
last few weeks and also have input on the following topics:

1.  part-of. 
a.  I met with evan about the simpler part-of note.  Evan is interesting 
in contributing to that one and I also agreed to help.  as background, i 
designed the part-of  solution for ontolingua/jtp part-of reasoning in 
the high performance knowledge base effort.  we essentially put in some 
structure for some set of part-of relationships and identified critical 
properties of those notions such as if they were transitive.
i had spoken to evan about geographic containment in particular since it 
is so useful and less controversial than others.
i also contacted mike uschold by email about this simpler note and asked 
if he would be interested in helping since i believe he has done a more 
thorough look at gruber's units and measures than anyone.  he agreed.
b.  I also spoke to chris about his broader notion of a part-of note and 
agreed to help with that. arguably the simpler note a might be a 
starting point for one portion of the broader note b.   for example, 
note a could be very operational with an example solution and note b 
could include more discussion about the thornier part-of issues and less 
agreed upon issues.

2. Time.  In May, I spoke with Jerry Hobbs about a note based on his 
time ontology.  He was interested then.  The idea might be to take his 
work as a starting point.  I offered to help with this since we also 
have a special temporal reasoner in jtp that we are now integrating with 
owl time.
The work is not quite done but when it is, that might be a convenient 
starting point as an operational example of using owl time.

3.  Role Closing.  It may make sense for alan and me to talk about this 
one and do it together.  In the classic stereo configurator for example, 
we had a special "close all roles" function implemented to that a user 
could call from the interface by the click of a button.  it had a 
general solution embedded in it but also leveraged information about the 
domain.   With colleagues, I started to write up the general solution 
for publication and we identified that there were thornier problems 
lurking and unfortunately we never finished the academic quality 
publication.
In some of the CLASSIC literature, i mentioned a little about simple 
operational solutions.  I am thinking that an operationally oriented 
note combining alan's and my perspectives might go a long way.
a while ago i started the "how to do it" collection for webont.  i can 
go back and find the one on closing roles and send that in another email.

more generally, one thing i saw oep doing was moving forward with the 
how to do it notion  where the emphasis was on helping normal people use 
owl.     that was somewhat motivated by the usefulness of the "tricks of 
the trade" portion of the "living with classic" paper.   that attemped 
to mention some of the typical questions we were asked and the "typical" 
modeling solutions.

selfishly, i would like to find a way to contribute to notes that are 
both useful and fun.  One aspect of fun to write might be that some 
portion of them may be useful for a publication.  It is conceivable that 
we might have the operational/useful starting point that is the simpler 
note to get out
and then have a second phase of the note that is something that has more 
scholarly contribution.

d




Christopher Welty wrote:

>
> Here are some suggestions for the topics of future OEP notes for 
> "ontology patterns".  I want to get some feedback both from the task 
> force and the WG in general regarding other topics.  This is something 
> of a synthesis of stuff that is needed, and stuff that we think people 
> can do.  Please make this an agenda item for next week's telecon.  We 
> hope to have something more concrete by the f2f, this is just intended 
> to get people thinking:
>
> The partOf relation.  There really isn't that much that can be "said" 
> in OWL (and therefore less in RDF) regarding the typical 
> axiomatizations of partOf, but knowing the different kinds of partOf 
> relations and what they are supposed to mean would be useful.  I'm 
> hoping that some subset of Nicola, Alan, and I can take the lead on 
> this one, but I also see the need for a couple of notes here, so I 
> think this needs further discussion.  For example Deborah expressed 
> interest in a simpler note (less ambitious but quicker turnaround) on 
> geographical containment.
>
> Units and measures.  There has been some work on this, including in 
> Cyc, Tom Gruber's ontology in Ontolingua, and Helena Sofia-Pinto did a 
> nice one for the old SUO effort.  Evan was interested in this and it 
> certainly makes sense to have someone at NIST do it.
>
> Subjects.  The notion of what a subject "is" and what the "subjectOf" 
> relation means can be quite confusing.  I have done a lot of work on 
> this and am willing to take this one on, however I will want to do one 
> at a time.
>
> Time.  Jerry Hobbs has done a very thorough job putting together a 
> consensus ontology of time based on a lot of existing time ontologies, 
> most of which draw from the Allen calculus.  The ontology is expressed 
> in FOL (KIF), but there are (necessarily simplified) DAML+OIL and OWL 
> ("OWL-Time") versions  available.  Jerry has expressed interest in 
> seeing this as a W3C note.
>
> Fluents.  Closely tied to the notion of time is being able to say that 
> a binary property "holds" for a time. e.g. one may want to say that 
> "Chris is a member of the W3C from Sept, 2004 - Sept 2005".  A 
> property like memberOf is a fluent because it can be said to hold at a 
> time (this is not strictly a correct definition, but it will suffice). 
>  While OWL-Time let's you represent a time interval like "Sept, 
> 2004-Sept, 2005", it remains neutral wrt what happens at or during 
> such a time interval.  The typical move in FOL is to use a function or 
> add an argument to the predicate, e.g. memberOf(Chris, W3C, 
> time-interval-1), however clearly we can't do that in OWL or RDF, 
> since we are limited to binary predicates.  One solution is to go for 
> full reification of fluents, as in the exsiting not on n-ary 
> relations, however there are some other choices.  I'm hoping I can get 
> Pat Hayes and Richard Fikes to work with me on this one.
>
> On the side of "ontology engineering":
>
> Ontology 101 tutorial specifically for OWL/RDF.
>
> I think a note to help orient people on the role OWL and RDF in 
> semantic integration is critical, I get pinged on that regularly.  I 
> lot of people think OWL is the silver bullet for semantic integration 
> (I suggested at ISWC last year that semantic integration is a 
> mountain, not a werewolf, and OWL is, at best, a small silver chisel). 
> There was just a Dagstuhl symposium on this subject in general (i.e. 
> not specific to OWL), and special issues of AI Magazine and Sigmod 
> record coming out as well.  I hope Natasha and/or MikeU will take the 
> lead on such a note.
>
> People who know what "ontology" and "semantics" actually mean (in the 
> much larger world outside of computer science), often ask why the two 
> have become nearly synonymous on the semantic web.  Personally, I 
> think its a fair question and a short note on why we're so confused 
> would be worthwhile.  Maybe this goes in another task force (wasn't 
> there a clean up the mess we've made task force?)
>
> We're open to other suggestions.
>
> -Chris (OEP co-co)
>
> Dr. Christopher A. Welty, Knowledge Structures Group
> IBM Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Dr., Hawthorne, NY  10532     
> USA              
> Voice: +1 914.784.7055,  IBM T/L: 863.7055, Fax: +1 914.784.7455
> Email: welty@watson.ibm.com, Web: 
> http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty/ 


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 Deborah L. McGuinness 
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