Re: UDDI and semantics: CMU OWL-S/UDDI Mapping

Paul Denning wrote:

> if I find_service in UDDI with a <categoryBag><keyedReference 
> tModelKey=<foo> keyValue="Y" /></categoryBag>,
> would I not discover S1 and S2?
>
> This seems like the current UDDI can answer your question, and is more 
> powerful than a keyword lookup. 

It seems to me that this is precisely the way that the CMU OWL-S/UDDI 
Mapping works. You could think of it as a way of annotating the service 
with the semantics of OWL-S, using UDDI to save the annotations (and 
using UDDI conventions as the annotation mechanism).

> If you search UDDI for a name rather than a categoryBag, then I would 
> agree that it is essentially a keyword search.  But UDDI provides the 
> categoryBag, which to me is more powerful than a simple "keyword".
>
> The key is learning the taxonomy, for both the people who publish to 
> UDDI and the people who would search UDDI using that taxonomy.
> Same thing seems like it would apply to ontologies and any other form 
> of registry or index.  Training!

This is a seldom mentioned point, and I think it cuts even deeper than 
you seem to suggest here. Not only do the people who publish and the 
people who search have to use the same taxonomy (or taxonomies),  but 
they have to use it (them) in the same way. The searchers have to be 
able to mimic the publishers' understanding of how their services fit 
into the categories of the taxonomy (or taxonomies) that they are using.

>
> UDDI products like Systinet WASP UDDI allow you to search a taxonomy 
> for keywords (e.g., keyName=%keyword%).  So if you do not know the 
> taxonomy, searching the taxonomy will help you find potential items in 
> a taxonomy, which you then use to build up a categoryBag that you use 
> to search UDDI.  (Note that you look in the taxonomy for keyName since 
> keyValue is often a number.  For example, NAICS keyValue="112111" and 
> keyName="Beef Cattle Ranching and Farming".)

Searching the taxonomy can help (help to form a useful UDDI query, that 
is), but only if you know what to search for. That is, only if the 
people who search UDDI search the taxonomy with the same search terms 
that the people who published to UDDI used to search the taxonomy with. 
One possible way forward might be to use some meta-taxonomy to index the 
taxonomy (which is used to annotate the services in UDDI), in the way 
that WordNet has been used to annotate the IEEE upper ontology.

Jeff

>
> If by "current UDDI", you mean that the set of pre-canned taxonomies 
> (NAICS, UNSPSC, ISO3166) do not support it, I would agree.  But the 
> current UDDI lets you publish tModels for your own taxonomies, which 
> you can then use in categoryBags.  The support in UDDI products for 
> working with taxonomies can be better.  The web browser (HTML) GUI 
> provided by UBR and private UDDI registries usually do not let you 
> specify an unchecked taxonomy in a search or in publishing, so you 
> have to resort to the SOAP interface.
>
> Paul
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 12:57:23 UTC