SSN Key Ontologies Reference List - Inputs

Hi,

I won't attend today's meeting (it's time to go home) but John's call prompted me to post a few comments here to fire up the discussion.

Laurent

1) A reminder of a similar effort
D.2.1 State of the Art - Sensor Information Services
http://www.ict-sensei.org/images/Documents/sensei_wp2_d2.1.pdf
page 13: 2.1.2 Ontologies for modelling sensor and actuator
Avancha2004
Jurdak2004
Eid2006
IEEE1451
Niles2001 (SUMO)
Russomanno2005
OGC2007 (SensorML)
Cybenko2003
Liu2005

2) On the list of criteria to be used for the evaluation template:

It's roughly okay but I have a few pet topics like:
- systematic presence of textual descriptions or not (because it's impossible to get them later)
- traceability to references or not (there are some ontologies, not many, which do provide the references to the relevant journal articles or technical spec.)
- presence of a significant number of examples or not


3) I have started a list of all the resources describing sensor and instruments in general here:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/Sensor_types

On top of this list I have put the work by OIML: International Organization of Legal Metrology for two reasons:
-          they propose an ontology skeleton in http://www.oiml.org/publications/V/V002-200-e07.pdf
-          they have collected useful stuff on a wide range of sensors/instruments http://www.oiml.org/publications/

Should it be added the list of reviewed examples?

4) On the shortlisted ones, here are a few rapid comments

CSIRO's one:
- a bit to OWL-S-ish although I agree there is a need for some harmonisation around it..
- it's also a bit too abstract. Let's start to think on how we can apply it to real examples of sensors (see point 2).

M Eid et al:
- another one which uses IEEE 1451 http://ieee1451.nist.gov/

OntoSensor:
See my more complete comments here: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/OntoSensor_Review
(some practical examples maybe worth saving?)

MMI Device:
- it's half a product/device ontology and half a "metrology" one (It would be good to compare it to OIML - see my comments above)

SensorML process:
- I can help with the events vs. process discussion we'll have to have at some stage. I've read my classic (e.g. Galton)

CESN:
- too small to count

OOSThetys:
- Remind me of something similar I've got also inspired by Simon Cox's O&M. Useful for discussion about the ontology (foundry or skeleton) structure.

WISNO:
- more agent-ish (and driven by situation awareness requirements) than purely sensor-ish - except the importation of  IEEE 1451 defs.


5) Finally, what's missing in the list?

Maybe work done for imagery sensors (e.g. ISO 1930 or a more specific source taken from the reference below)

Wolfgang Kresse (2008) STANDARDIZATION IN PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND REMOTE SENSING  Beijing 2008
http://www.isprs.org/congresses/beijing2008/proceedings/4_pdf/307.pdf

Also other work on "virtual" or "macro" sensors descriptions like what this swiss group may have done (BTW, have I missed a more recent publication on the structure of their metadata?):

Nicolas Dawes, K. Ashwin Kumar, Sebastian Michel, Karl Aberer, Michael Lehning. Sensor Metadata Management and its Application in Collaborative Environmental Research. 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science. e-Science 2008. Indianapolis, IN, USA. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumber=4736722&arnumber=4736751&count=180&index=28


I hope this helps.
Laurent