RE: Event significance and event types(was:Event Significance)

Thanks for this contribution,

I'd like to make a few comments:

It seems to me that the current IPTC taxonomy of "Subjects News Codes" is
already a taxonomy of "event types". When we state that the subject of a news
item is "swimming" we really mean that the subject of this news is an event
related to the act of swimming, ie a swimming event. A subject of "consumer
goods" means an event related to consumer goods. 

Katarina was a "meteorological disaster", which is an existing IPTC news code.
Therefore we (news agencies) are already able to speak about "event types".

The new subject of study among news agencies like AFP and Reuters is the
management of individual entities (eg events) and the creation of news
ontologies, where event types (aka themes) and named entities (people,
organizations, locations events ...) can be interlinked in a semantic network.

But it seems impossible to create a worldwide and market-wide "news ontology" (I
mean the formal expression of classes of concepts and named relationships btw
concepts). As an example, some news organization are interested in parenthood
between people; others want to keep track of "who sleeps with who" ;-) Some
organizations process concepts like people and organizations, others treat
animals as a special class of concept.
  
What NewsML 2 aims at is offering the plumbing needed by news organizations for
managing and distributing their own formal ontologies. 

Laurent Le Meur
IPTC NewsML 2 Architecture WP chair
Agence France Presse, Head of Medialab

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Azamat [mailto:abdoul@cytanet.com.cy]
> Sent: 13 March 2006 21:13
> To: Misha Wolf
> Cc: semantic-web@w3.org; newsml-2@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: Event significance
> 
> It is pleasing to read that such news organizations as Reuters (Misha) and
> Agence France-Presse (Laurent) are so much concerned  about such fundamental
> issues as: the nature of events (reported), assigning a significance to news
> events, and how this may be reflected in a machine-processed representation.
> 
[...]
> 
> Bottom line: to adequately represent and reason about events, we have to
> trouble not about their formal representations and subjectively given
> meanings but rather about a consistent ontology of processes of changes.
> 
> Azamat Abdoullaev
> EIS Encyclopedic Intelligent Systems LTD
> http://www.eis.com.cy
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Misha Wolf" <Misha.Wolf@reuters.com>
> To: <newsml-2@yahoogroups.com>; <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 9:13 PM
> Subject: RE: Event significance
> 
> On 10 March, Misha wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> A note on events vs event types: Though I use the term *event* in
> the above, what I'm describing is really an *event type*.  A
> hurricane (or a meteorological disaster) is an instance of an
> event type, while Hurricane Katrina is an instance of an actual
> event of that type.
> 
> We need to be able to "speak" of both events and event types.  It
> is not valuable or even feasible to give every event an identity
> (ie a URI) which would make it possible to make statements about it.
> It is more plausible to give URIs to event types and to significant
> events.
> 
> Misha
> ------------------- NewsML 2 resources ------------------------------
> http://www.iptc.org/        | http://www.iptc.org/NAR/
> http://www.iptc.org/NAR/1.0 | http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newsml-2/
> 



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Received on Thursday, 16 March 2006 17:49:28 UTC