Re: [OEP] OWL and Semantic interoperability $swbpd

Actually, my thought was specifically with regard to OWL ontologies, 
since the
ODM includes a metamodel of OWL, supports OWL import/export from UML
tools, and enables interoperability between OWL ontologies and other 
logical
and physical models of a particular set of resources.

This approach also directly supports MDA based interoperability among
applications, providing much of the syntactic infrastructure support.  It
does not address agent communications as you point out, but provides other
mechanics so that knowledge engineers do not need to address those issues.

This may still be beyond the scope of what you want to discuss, but is
relevant to OWL-based interoperability in general.

Thanks,

Elisa


Uschold, Michael F wrote:

>There's lots of kinds of 'semantic interoperability' which could be a
>20-page paper in its own right.
>
>This note is focussing on how two agents or applications might
>communicate with each other even though they both have different
>ontologies. Interoperability can happen by executing semantic mappings
>between the two ontologies (e.g. you can say the class 'car' is logially
>equivalent to the class 'auto'; you can also express equivalence of
>individuals and properties. This assumes that all ontologies are in OWL.
>
>You seem to be talking about interoperability among DIFFERENT
>logic/KR/ontology languages. That is a whole different matter that is
>beyond the scope of this note.
>
>Mike
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Elisa F. Kendall [mailto:ekendall@sandsoft.com] 
>Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2005 3:43 PM
>To: Uschold, Michael F
>Cc: public-swbp-wg@w3.org
>Subject: 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>
>
>
>  
>