[VocabMgmt] DERI, Galway - possible contribution areas

Hi,

> I believe you attached a PDF file, which does not really
> work in an email- and wiki-driven cooperation environment.
> My suggestion would be to summarize your ideas as an email
> posting or create a wiki page then point to it (with a summary)
> from an email posting.

Thomas, thanks very much for the advice - I'm summing up the text in
this e-mail below (a semi-automatically transformed from LaTeX and pdf
to txt, however, hopefully without any errors that could harm the
overall readability)...

Feel free to ask any questions and thus help to perhaps a little specify
the rather abstract aims presented in the following text.

Thank you,
best regards,
Vit

>>>

_Title_: Initial Notes for the W3C's "Basic Principles for Managing an
RDF Vocabulary" Contribution

_Authors_: Vit Novacek, Siegfried Handschuh (e-mail:
firstname.lastname@deri.org)

This document presents initial notes on possible DERI, NUIG contribution
to the W3C SWD "Basic Principles for Managing an RDF Vocabulary"
document. Main sections (according to the draft at
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/VocabMgtDraft) affected:

   - 3. Articulate your Maintenance Policies
   - 4. Identify Versions

General relevant background and plans of the contributors:

   - research in dynamic ontology lifecycle [3]
   - special emphasis on:
     = ontology learning in data-intensive domains
     = (mainly learned) ontology integration [2]
       into laymen-oriented collaborative framework for ontology
       development [1]
     = resolution of issues resulting from the above two points --
       mainly using ontology versioning, alignment, negotiation, merging,
       reasoning (e.g. dynamic inconsistency resolution), automatic
       evaluation, etc.
   - during the year 2007 (final KW year), planned initiation and
     realisation of an industry transfer of the lifecycle implementation
     (currently in progress) and related technologies (mainly in the
     bio-medicine domain)

_Articulate your Maintenance Policies_

General issue -- coverage of the use-case when the users are ontology
developers, at least to some extent, at the same time (scientists,
librarians, etc., using their expert domain knowledge when developing
"their" ontology by means of user-friendly and laymen-oriented
interfaces).

This is somehow outside the usual dichotomy of developers/users,
nonetheless, this use case could be in our opinion very practical with
growing adoption of wiki-like [4] and other collaborative interfaces [1]
for ontology development.

Preliminary notes on other more specific maintenance issues to be
possibly added:

   1. some material on collaborative development -- how to negotiate,
      accept/reject and document changes in a distributed collaborative
      environment
   2. some material on how to incorporate automatically extracted
      knowledge in a "best" way (if needed at all) -- perhaps partially
      in line with a "protocol" proposed within the previous point

_Identify Versions_

Preliminary notes:

   1. as one of the "technical" examples, describe the versioning policy
      in a reference implementation, the SemVersion
      system [5]
   2. develop a general recommendation in the sense of the following:
      manage the changing identifiers (URIs) in consecutive versions in
      a lexically coherent way, if possible -- it allows to link the
      different versions of the same concept/relation by automatic means
      (more easily), alleviating the end user effort
   3. think about the term descriptions version management -- not only
      URIs change - this could be even more important in case of
      vocabularies where direct "human-readability" is crucial
   4. perhaps add also more theory-based content -- in line with the
      planned KW "theoretical" deliverable, covering (1) logical
      background of ontology change and (2) reasoning (C-OWL supported)
      with different versions of an ontology; more specifically:
      = _what_ should be identified (e.g. encoded into the versioned
        ontology) by the developers in this respect
      = _how_ it should be done (which syntactic constructs to use,
        etc.) in order to allow users to efficiently and clearly
       (unambiguously) use the vocabulary even if it changes

_References_

[1] S. Kruk, J. Breslin, and S. Decker. MarcOnt initiative. Lion
Deliverable. Lion 3.01, DERI, Galway, 2005.

[2] V. Novacek, M. Dabrowski, S. R. Kruk, and S. Handschuh. Extending
community ontology using automatically generated suggestions. In
Proceedings of FLAIRS 2007. AAAI Press, 2007. In press.

[3] V. Novacek, S. Handschuh, L. Laera, D. Maynard, M. Voelkel, T.
Groza, V. Tamma, and S. R. Kruk. Report and prototype of dynamics in the
ontology lifecycle (D2.3.8v1). Deliverable 238v1, Knowledge Web, 2006.

[4] S. Schaffert, A. Gruber, and R. Westenthaler. A semantic wiki for
collaborative knowledge formation. In Proceedings of Semantics 2005.
Trauner Verlag, 2006.

[5] M. Voelkel and T. Groza. SemVersion: RDF-based ontology versioning
system. In Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference
WWW/Internet 2006 (ICWI 2006), 2006.

>>>

Received on Tuesday, 20 March 2007 13:13:55 UTC