REQDOC: The WebOnt Requirements Document

Hello everyone,

It was a pleasure meeting many of you in New Jersey this week. We are
preparing to edit the requirements document and need your input. If you
were the chair of one of the breakout sessions on use cases please send
us information on the following items produced by your session:

Detailed representative use cases (about one page each)
Detailed design goals, if any (about one page each)
Requirements (short paragraphs, also mention which use case or design
goal motivated the requirements)

Please collect this in ASCII text format and post it to the mailing list
with a REQDOC: prefix by Wed. Jan 24. Of course, you are welcome to
solicit input from members of the original use case subgroup, but we
would prefer if each group only posted a single message. If you are
unable to meet this timeframe, please appoint someone from your use case
group to perform this task. If my memory serves me correctly, the chairs
of the use case breakout sessions were:

Content Interoperablity - Mike Dean or Leo Obrst
Collection Management - Guus Schreiber
Web Services - Stefan Decker
General Requirements - Deborah McGuinness

To remind you of the use cases, design goals, and requirements, I've
attached Jim's original summary of the product of the four breakout
sessions. Note that I've sorted the requirements by the initial grade
given by playing "Dan's game." Please send the paragraph for every
requirement regardless of the grade assigned. We plan to provide things
that some people see as requirements but were rejected by the group in a
separate section, and at any rate having them there allows for us to
still discuss and consider them.

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Jeff, Jonathan, and Raphael

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USE CASES:
- web site mgt
- Homogenous collection
- doc about an object/artifact/design

- Travel planning
- Portal from multiple sources

- Ubiq. Computing (small devices)


DESIGN GOALS:
- Shared Ontologies
- Ontology Extension
- Ontology evolution
- Detect Inconsistency
- Ontology Interoperability
- Scalability
- Ease of Use
- XML syntax
- Expressiveness
- Internationalization


REQUIREMENTS:
A Annotation/tagging of ontologies (some particular properties)
A Ontology namespaces/inter-ontology reference
A ability to state uniq. names
A character set support
A lexical representation (internationalization)
A ontology management language features (versioning)
A unambiguous term referencing using URIs
A uniqueness of unicode strings
B Define range contraints on data types
B Ontology mapping relations (equivalento)
B ability to state closed worlds
B commitment to  ontologies
B ontology partitioning
B solution to "tagging/grouping" problem
B- Class as instance
B- Relational Types
B- records (complex datatypes)
C capability (chaining of properties, transitivity)
C effective decision procedure
C layered approach
C- commitment to portions of ontologies
X ability to integrate signatures
X bit efficient encoding
X defaults
X multicultural mechanism (view)
X support for speech acts
X unique name assumption
- (procedural attachment)
- Definitional constraints of conjunctive type
- arithmetic primitives
- pre and post conditions
- support for expressing work flow
- support for variables


OPEN ISSUES:
- defaults appear to be needed, but difficult or impossible
- presentation syntax
- explainability

Received on Thursday, 17 January 2002 17:33:01 UTC