[VocabMgt] NUIG contributions - report on "hot" issues

Hi,

we were already a little overtime when the Vocabulary management topic area was being discussed yesterday, so I didn't want to prolong the telcon even more... Therefore I'm summing some of the "news" from Knowledge Web/NUIG I wanted to report about a little in an e-mail. 

Elisa - feel free to pick-up any point from the following, which you'd like to incorporate (perhaps after some modifications) into the VocabMgt wiki [1] (most likely mainly into Sections 3 and 4).

All - feel free to comment on, ask for clarification or propose extension of anything before we will actually put something perhaps in a little more "wordy" way into the wiki.

The issues to be reported:

I. We're preparing a basic questionnaire on ontology versioning related demands and requirements. Initially proposed general questions are:

- What approach to the ontology versioning would you prefer (options: syntax (CVS) based versioning, transaction based versioning, merge based versioning, semantic extension of syntactic versioning if applicable)?
- Would you prefer versioning of ontologies in 'pure' RDF, OWL (which variant?) or in other non-RDF-based format?
- Would you prefer syntactic (CVS-like diffs at the triple level), semantic (diffs at the deductive closure level) or combined (both deductive closure differences and syntactic features marked in the computed diff) versioning?
- In case of semantic versioning, what types of inference would you like to be included (e.g. transitive closure computation, sub-class subsumption or consistency-checking) into the versioning process? Would you prefer computationally efficient or semantically rich diff computation?
- Would you like to explicitely mark features like possible inconsistencies in the computed semantic diff?
- What other features in particular would you like to explicitely identify in the semantic diff?

Places/people to be 'spammed' with the questionnaire:

- OBO people
- Manchester "ontology" people
- Alan Ruttenberg (from Scientific Commons, has been involved in pharmaceutical ontologies)
- Frank Chum -(a guy from the Chevron company dealing with ontology application in the petroleum industry, who expressed interest in our Knowledge Web work at WWW2007)
- some relevant W3C groups
- Knowledge Web people - mainly Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (methodological perspective), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (OOA consortium, Dogma perspectives) and      Univesity of Karlsruhe/OntoPrise (KAON perspective, OntoPrise industrial perspectives)
- perhaps also some Nepomuk (an EU "semantic desktop" project) people

II. We have planned and initiated work on a Knowledge Web deliverable that should describe ontology change from the theoretical perspective. Examples of content that 
may be of interest:
- how to make an 'ideal' diff (from the syntax and semantics point of view)
- consequences of 'non-ideal' diff in the versioned ontology
- reasoning with changing ontologies and recommendations related to ontology maintenance to be followed in order to facilitate inference among different versions of an ontology

III. As a part of the Knowledge Web "Semantic Web Framework" definition intiatives, we have prepared a draft list describing several major applications explicitely dealing with ontology evolution [2]. This may be perhaps also of some interest within the VocabMgt efforts and document.

Thanks for your comments!

Best regards,
Vit

[1] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/VocabMgtDraft
[2] http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/ole/deri/OE.doc

---
Vit Novacek

Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group (SmILE)
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
National University of Ireland, Galway
http://www.deri.ie/about/team/member/vit_novacek/
http://smile.deri.ie/
Tel: +353 91 495738

Received on Wednesday, 20 June 2007 19:39:30 UTC