- From: <Holger.Neuhaus@csiro.au>
- Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:37:16 +1000
- To: <simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu>, <public-xg-ssn@w3.org>
Hi all, I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding, Simon. By "all of O&M" I was more referring to a full-blown ontology(-module). It was just me being too lazy to write 'Observation/Phenomena', I hope you can forgive me ;-) But you're making a good point at the same time; I was pretty much thinking the same - having a few core concepts close to OGC-O&M (this time I mean it), maybe those of O&M itself. I just didn't want to be too suggestive, as you guys can't see whether I'm wearing the chair's hat or the developer's hat... Comments? Cheers, Holger Dr. Holger Neuhaus Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Tasmanian ICT Centre CSIRO Phone: +61 3 6232 5547 | Fax: +61 3 6232 5000 holger.neuhaus@csiro.au | www.csiro.au | www.csiro.au/science/TasICTCentre.html Address: GPO Box 1538, Hobart TAS 7001, Australia The Tasmanian ICT Centre is jointly funded by the Australian Government through the Intelligent Island Program and CSIRO. The Intelligent Island Program is administered by the Tasmanian Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts. PLEASE NOTE The information contained in this email may be confidential or privileged. Any unauthorised use or disclosure is prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please delete it immediately and notify the sender by return email. Thank you. To the extent permitted by law, CSIRO does not represent, warrant and/or guarantee that the integrity of this communication has been maintained or that the communication is free of errors, virus, interception or interference. Please consider the environment before printing this email. -----Original Message----- From: Simon Cox [mailto:simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu] Sent: Monday, 10 August 2009 4:41 PM To: Neuhaus, Holger (ICT Centre, Hobart); public-xg-ssn@w3.org Subject: RE: purpose/goals for observations ontologies Hold on a moment - what do you think "all of O&M" is? The OGC spec(*) (Part 1 - Observation Schema) includes a mere 5 classes in the normative part, 3 of which are included from other ontologies like SensorML! How much more basic can you get? Part 2 (Sampling Features) has 13 classes, but the ontology is simple. I'm afraid that some of last weeks telecon, and emails like this, suggest that the analysis of 'O&M' by this group has in some cases not involved reading the original sources. As a consequence some significant misunderstandings are being propagated. (*) Unless I'm mistaken, and O&M refers to something different? Simon Cox European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Spatial Data Infrastructures Unit, TP 262 Via E. Fermi, 2749, I-21027 Ispra (VA), Italy Tel: +39 0332 78 3652 Fax: +39 0332 78 6325 mailto:simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/simon-cox SDI Unit: http://sdi.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ IES Institute: http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ JRC: http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ -----Original Message----- From: public-xg-ssn-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-ssn-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Holger.Neuhaus@csiro.au Sent: Monday, 10 August 2009 03:34 To: public-xg-ssn@w3.org Subject: RE: purpose/goals for observations ontologies Hi all, I pretty much agree with what's being said here. So, we shouldn't cover all of O&M in the SSN Ontology, and it's also out of scope to develop an ontology for O&M. But - we need to have some kind of "basic O&M structure" that enables the alignment/inclusion of an O&M ontology. We should have a discussion about that at the next telecon. We also need to discuss which bit to amend/extend/add to the ontology. In addition, I agree with John that the 'use cases will have to be refined and prioritized (and a fair number excluded [...]) if they are to be the basis of our determination of what to include or not include in the model.' And yes, that is "real work", so that we'd have to discuss that part at the next telecon as well. Comments are welcome. Cheers, Holger Dr. Holger Neuhaus Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Tasmanian ICT Centre CSIRO Phone: +61 3 6232 5547 | Fax: +61 3 6232 5000 holger.neuhaus@csiro.au | www.csiro.au | www.csiro.au/science/TasICTCentre.html Address: GPO Box 1538, Hobart TAS 7001, Australia The Tasmanian ICT Centre is jointly funded by the Australian Government through the Intelligent Island Program and CSIRO. The Intelligent Island Program is administered by the Tasmanian Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts. PLEASE NOTE The information contained in this email may be confidential or privileged. Any unauthorised use or disclosure is prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please delete it immediately and notify the sender by return email. Thank you. To the extent permitted by law, CSIRO does not represent, warrant and/or guarantee that the integrity of this communication has been maintained or that the communication is free of errors, virus, interception or interference. Please consider the environment before printing this email. -----Original Message----- From: public-xg-ssn-request@w3.org [mailto:public-xg-ssn-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Kevin R. Page Sent: Wednesday, 5 August 2009 7:54 AM To: public-xg-ssn@w3.org Subject: Re: purpose/goals for observations ontologies Hello John, comments inline, On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 13:52 -0600, John Graybeal wrote: > On Aug 4, 2009, at 10:20 AM, Kevin R. Page wrote: > > > We should recognise that both user-oriented (data) and process- > > oriented > > (sensor) use cases exist (as reflected in current OGC standards). > > I am having trouble with this framing; maybe just an ambiguity, or > maybe more. So I know there are those on this list who are more familiar, and can no doubt elaborate more eloquently, on the distinctions made in current OGC standards - please do (and correct me :) ) I guess my bracketed 'data' and 'sensor' above show where I see the differences (and I don't want to overdo them as differences). I'll start with an (over-simplistic) description of where I'm coming from: 1) sometimes, we might start with a sensor network, with it's elements described according to the device ontology. We might use the ontology to manage the sensor network. We might use the descriptions of sensor properties and data capabilities to pick out particular sensors, and from there get to the data that sensor has produced. Absolutely, this is the device ontology. 2) at other times we might start with a large amount of data produced by a sensor network, and from that we want to create useful information. It's more than just data; we care about concepts like observations, measurements, context, so that we can process the data effectively. Descriptions about the actual sensors is metadata to this data; that's not so say it isn't important, it very much is (e.g. as provenance, or to infer the classification of the data from the sensor capabilities), but we're starting from the data. I don't think there's any horrific difference or schism here. There's obviously overlap - it's the same data. Sometimes you come at different parts of it from different directions. And it's much easier to bring these two viewpoints together in the RDF world than the XML Schema world. So a device ontology might have some O&M concepts included; an O&M ontology might have some device concepts included; it might be one big ontology (don't have to use all of it, after all). As long as whatever ontology (or ontologies) we end up with enables us to just have devices, or just have observations, and get from one to the other as and when we can (or want to) link that data. >From another perspective: semantic web technologies can be applied to improve sensor networks; but I think it's equally, if not more, important that sensor networks and the data they output become part of the semantic web of data. These aren't orthogonal tasks. > I agree that use cases about the (actual output) data *produced by* > sensors exist. and it matters that this data was produced by sensors; these use cases need to capture and encode this. > Use cases about the data *describing* actual sensors (name, size, > color, and all that) also exist. The latter is what I thought a device > ontology should encompass. Yes. And perhaps 'device ontology' is a clearer description of that ontology if it doesn't include O&M concepts. > So, which of these did you mean by 'user-oriented (data)'? (I suggest > that 'user-oriented' is entirely a function of the user, and some > users care only about the devices, not their data; so maybe this isn't > an optimal term.) Indeed, I am not fond of the term. So I think 'user-oriented (data)' as originally cited is the former - but the data describing sensors is still there as (vital) metadata. (Illustrative use of the term 'metadata' - I'm not sure I believe in metadata enough to classify what is and isn't data ;) ) > Will the introduction of the 'process oriented' way of looking at the > device -- the framing introduced by SensorML, which I have heard > summarized as "the sensor is a process", right? -- tell me more, less, > or the same information as a 'simple descriptive model'? About the device? The same. I think the 'process' concept encapsulates the manner by which the observation was gathered. When this is a sensor, the information about the 'process' instance is (or could be) the simple descriptive model / the device ontology. > Put another way, is there necessarily any difference between the two? I'd rather there not be. I think we can do both. As Krzysztof's recently arrived email says, a good starting place is probably to extend the observation concept in the sensor ontology. > To tie this back to the larger question I started with, It just seems > to me that where some element comes from a process, the ontology will > naturally describe that ("sensor producesDataRecord recordType1"). And when I come across an instance of 'recordType1' I want to know that it was produced by an instance of 'sensor'. Regards, Kevin -- Kevin R. Page krp@ecs.soton.ac.uk http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/info/people/krp Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia University of Southampton, UK
Received on Monday, 10 August 2009 23:53:21 UTC