Re: Abstract Core Ontology for SWSL Processes

At 13:35 26/01/2004 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>I have done a little work on developing a "real world" semantic web 
>application to control network access [1].  The temporal element was the 
>description of time intervals during which certain kinds of access is 
>permitted.  The reasoning support required is pretty simple;  questions 
>like:  is this time (e.g. now) within this interval?  Also, maybe more 
>importantly, being able to transform an internal representation into a 
>representation used by some other existing system -- this is mostly a 
>syntactic matter, but (for example) there could be requirements to 
>translate to intervals expressed as "from,to" or 
>"from,duration".  Handling of recurring intervals was the trickiest areas 
>I encountered.

>My work was based on the emerging RDF vocabulary [2] for iCalendar format 
>[3], and (after teasing out some ambiguities) the semantics thus provided 
>were plenty adequate to handle my modest goals.


This is a great example of why I feel we should provide a general way in 
SWSL to add ANY type of constraint.  So someone can choose for some 
community to add say "recurring temporal specifications" for the constraint 
specification and suitable ways to use these to constraint the enactment of 
a service or process.

We would lose if we fix the specifications.

I feel SWSL should actually be quite a lightweight upper model of services 
and processes with relatively little fixed in the core... and the majority 
done through adding in further specifications. Such additions need not be 
globally agreed... they can be shared in specialised communities in some 
cases. This is the way NIST PSL is structured.  The mechanism is a core 
plus modules (called partially shared views) approach itself based on 
earlier work on the MIT Process Handbook and the Process Interchange Format 
(PIF) work.

Austin





--
Prof. Austin Tate, Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute,
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh,
Appleton Tower, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE, UK
Tel: +44 131 650 2732 Fax: +44 131 650 6513 E-mail: a.tate@ed.ac.uk

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2004 19:11:21 UTC