SSN-XG Meeting Minutes (14 September) + Analysis of options on follow-up activities

Hi,

Thanks to Payam for scribing, and to everyone who attended the telephone conference yesterday. We gained some insights on the possible pathways for the follow-up activities (special thanks to Alexandre Passant (DERI) for sharing his knowledge on possible options gained in other W3C activities like the Social Web XG or the SIOC ontology member submission). We have also welcomed Myriam Leggieri (also working for the SPITFIRE project at DERI) who will 

The minutes of the meeting are here: http://www.w3.org/2010/09/14-ssn-minutes.html .

In summary, there are multiple possibilities to continue the XG work in relation to W3C (which are not mutually exclusive):
- Option 1: continue to work as a "community" mixing W3C members and external collaborators to reach the point where the ontology is ready to be supplied to W3C as a member submission. In this case, co-authors which are non-W3C members are also listed in a W3C submission and needs to provide the same Intellectual property statements than the W3C members (so there is a bit of paperwork but nothing drastic). This is what happened with SIOC. The ontology is developed and maintained on an external site but it is officially acknowledged and reviewed by W3C (and the Team comment for the SIOC submission is worth reading),
- Option 2: propose the creation of a sensor / internet of things IG. Alexandre advised us yesterday that this is a special category of working group where it is possible to issue "best practice guidelines" but not any "recommendations" (standards). The examples of IGs I can refer you too are the eGov IG, the Health Care and Life Sciences IG. They are backed by a relatively important proportion of W3C members. So the criterion for the attractiveness of this option for W3C is mainly the number of members which back this request (or alternatively, the number of new memberships it may trigger). 
- Options 3: propose the creation of a working group who would be chartered to create a standard (a recommendation). Two issues here: first, work on ontology in working groups do happen in W3C but rarely (to date) as a standalone ontology, rather as an activity which feeds a standard with a broader scope. Secondly, W3C is more interested in ontologies which have a " foundational character". The Team comments on the SIOC submission are an illustration of this point: "W3C itself normally refrains from standardizing vocabularies or ontologies for specific application areas unless they have foundational character (e.g., SKOS) or they are an integral part of some other W3C activity". In this context, I can see two possibilities: 
* (3a) follow-up activity on the Semantic Markup work (revise and extend previous work done on SAWSDL and maybe also RDFa to match our needs), 
* (3b) follow-up activity to leverage what the SSN XG has done in an Internet of Things context (which is an important growth area for W3C and for the use of semantic web). 
One difficulty is that a hybrid semantics/Internet of things activity does not fit well in the current W3C structure because W3C has separate "domains" for Semantic Web, Mobile Web (and the less hot Web Services domain).  One recommendation I'd like to issue is that this structure does not work well for our case. But the SSN XG is not the only example of a cross-domain activity: to some extent future work on Social web standards and/or the arising work on Augmented Reality applications in discussions face the same issues of falling between the cracks. 
- Options 4: there are also other established W3C activities (and some activities which are in preparation) which can leverage the work done by the XG, including other XGs and also other working groups. The most relevant ones are: 
* (4a) Several participants to the Provenance XG (including CSIRO) have an interest in the Sensor Data provenance use cases 
* (4b) KNOESIS has announced plan to start an activity (a XG) around SA-REST which may develop the results obtained by the XG on the Semantic Markup problem, 
* (4c): The SSN ontology does not fully address the need for "human sensor" models which are critical for the Decision XG (exploratory work on standards for decision exchange, shared situational awareness, and measurement of the speed, effectiveness, and human factors of decision-making).
* (4d): The W3C POI (Point of Interest) working group is chartered to develop technical specifications for the representation of "Points of Interest" information on the Web. Points of Interest data has many uses, including augmented reality browsers, location-based social networking games, geocaching, mapping, navigation systems, and many others.

Can you please give m some feedback on which of these options have your preferences and also let me know if your organisation is also involved (or intends to be involved) in the activities listed above 4a-4d and consider them to be connected to the SSN XG follow-up work or not.

There is also one opportunity for follow-up work at OGC which has not been discussed yesterday: the reuse of the SSN ontology as a complement to the Geospatial ontology behind the GeoSPARQL standard in development. 

To progress on the planning of follow up activities and issues the recommendations for this part of the XG report, I need feedback on the options presented above, and on how they are (or are not aligned) with your own projects. Can you please comments on what's missing and would require significant amount of new work, especially for projects aiming at different kinds of applications (e.g. the Internet of Things for which we also need to model actuators). I also would like to collect more information on expressions of interest by non-participants to the XG to reuse the ontology as is or even to join the SSN community to participate to future developments. 

I have noticed that the level of interest in follow up activities expressed at the last meeting is particularly strong from the participants who are engaged in ongoing European research projects (SemSorGrid4Env, SENSEI) and on newly started ones like SPITFIRE, IoTA). If you don't know about these projects, especially the new ones, check the links provided below.

Cheers
Laurent

For more information about SIOC, you cab go to: 
- the SIOC web site:  http://sioc-project.org/  
- the SIOC member submission http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/  
- the W3C comment to the SIOC submission http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/Comment  

- Provenance XG: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/  
- Use case: Use Case Provenance for Environmental Marine Data http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Use_Case_Provenance_for_Environmental_Marine_Data 
- Decision XG: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/decision/  
- POI charter (proposal) : http://www.w3.org/2010/POI/charter/  (if you belong to a W3C Member, please ask your Advisory Committee Representative to comment on it here: http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/POI-2010/)  

- GeoSPARQL http://www.ogcnetwork.net/system/files/Spatial_SPARQL_Lopez.pdf and http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/socop-forum/2010-05/docb2aMvfG39U.doc 

- SemSorGrid4Env project http://www.semsorgrid4env.eu/ 
- SENSEI project http://www.sensei-project.eu/ 
- Smart-products: http://www.smartproducts-project.eu/ 
- SPITFIRE project http://spitfire-project.eu/factsheet  http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fire/docs/fp7-factsheets/spitfire_en.pdf 
- IoTA project Internet of Things Architecture http://www.iot-a.eu/public and http://www.coin-ip.eu/coin-community/community-documents/coin-public-documents/ice-2010-coin-workshops/Workshop%203%20p3%20-%20IoTA%20-%20Internet%20of%20Things%20Architecture.pdf/at_download/file

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 2010 13:02:42 UTC