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

here is the link to the Closing
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/webont/HowToDoIt/closingRoles.html

Deborah L. McGuinness wrote:

> 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/ 
>
>
>-- 
> Deborah L. McGuinness 
> Knowledge Systems Laboratory 
> 353 Serra Mall
> Gates Computer Science Building, 2A Room 241 
> Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020 
> email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
> URL: http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/index.html 
> (voice) 650 723 9770    (stanford fax) 650 725 5850   (computer fax)  801 705 0941
>  
>

-- 
 Deborah L. McGuinness 
 Knowledge Systems Laboratory 
 353 Serra Mall
 Gates Computer Science Building, 2A Room 241 
 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9020 
 email: dlm@ksl.stanford.edu
 URL: http://ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/index.html 
 (voice) 650 723 9770    (stanford fax) 650 725 5850   (computer fax)  801 705 0941