Re: [OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability

Mike,

The standards work we've been doing at the OMG to develop a set of MOF (Meta
Object Facility, essentially a subset of UML) metamodels and related 
artifacts for
RDFS, OWL, SCL, and Topic Maps might be relevant to achieving broader
interoperability as well as to some of the software engineering work 
you're kicking
off.  Some of the MOF tools do provide good metadata, metamodel, and model
management and interoperability capabilities.  What they lack is the 
semantic
representation and interoperability, and of course reasoning 
capabilities to enable
consistency checking, model validation, etc.  The goal for the Ontology 
Definition
Metamodel is to bridge this gap to the extent possible, allowing us to 
leverage other
existing metadata and models as a starting point for ontology 
development, providing
the semantics for a particular application or repository and linking 
them to other
models (logical and physical database models, or software component 
models, for
example), etc.

If it makes sense, we'd be happy to share a little more about recent 
developments
(last week Evan Wallace and I attended the OMG Technical Meeting in 
Burlingame). 
It might be relevant for your note, providing some of the infrastructure 
support
that OWL alone does not provide and potentially narrowing the discussion of
limitations. 

Let us know if an update on the recent meeting and plans for the next 
4-6 months
would be useful.

Thanks,

Elisa



Uschold, Michael F wrote:

> At a recent OEP meeting Pat Hayes made some great points, and there was
>some good discusion.  The following summarizes what was said, to the
>best of my ability.   
>
>*	many traditional prolbms of semantic interoperability will go
>away with the Semantic Web, mainly because there is an infrastructure to
>support semantic agreements (through publishing ontologies)  
>*	the Semantic Web forces people to think about making thing
>interoperable more than before, hence things will be better.
>*	problems of semantic interoperability will go away to the extent
>that people reference and re-use public ontologies in ways that are
>consistent with their original intended use.
>o	e.g. FOAF: mailboxOf , DC:author
>*	Semantic Web provides not only the technical capability, but the
>social motivation to resue concepts, so less translation will be
>necessary 
>*	Warning: reusing ontologies is hard, just like reusing software
>code is hard. People reuse code in the wrong way. The Semantic Web makes
>it likely that people will reuse [portions of] ontologies in incorrect
>ways too.
>
>Pat: can you please elaborate on this a bit, I'm sure I missed some key
>things.
>
>BTW: my current working abstract for the note is:
>
>This note addresses the role of OWL in overcoming problems of semantic
>heterogeneity.  We briefly characterize what we mean by semantic
>interoperability, and what the challenges are. We describe some OWL
>constructs that are designed to support semantic interoperability and
>illustrate them with examples. We highlight their strengths and
>limitations.  The main message is that OWL is no silver bullet for the
>general problem of achieving semantic interoperability.  The support
>provided is very limited.  Many of these limitations will be overcome by
>the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that is currently under
>development.
>
>
>Thanks
>Mike
>
>
>
>
>  
>

Received on Saturday, 5 February 2005 23:43:21 UTC