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[ontac-forum] Moving Forward

To: "'ONTAC-WG General Discussion'" <ontac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Cory Casanave" <cbc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 21:56:12 -0500
Message-id: <009201c60c23$6d90c270$0500a8c0@cbcpc>

ONTAC Group,

While I find many of the threads here interesting, there seems to be a lack of direction, focus and resolution.  May I be so bold as to suggest some structure?

 

First – process.  This group will probably NOT offer “new thought” in semantics, what it can offer is a process for this community of interest to establish what it considers to be it’s reference set of Ontologies along with their method of representation and infrastructure.  Debate is fine but we need a way to come to conclusion.  Once we have that way to come to conclusion we will have a way to establish our methodology and start populating the set of concepts that will allow for interoperability and data sharing.

 

Second, use cases – while there is a mission for the group it is quite broad and does not really address user requirements.  A valuable task for this group would be to collect and validate user driven requirements as well as the scenario of applying an upper ontology to those solutions.  This will help nail down the set of problems we are addressing and serve as a set of test cases for the solutions to be applied.  Such examples should be expressed in general but backed up with user driven and specific test cases.  I suspect this kind of focus is the only thing that can resolve the theoretical debates.

 

Third – Ontological structure and representation.  Much of the discussion has been about how to structure a family of Ontologies due to the problems of a “one true vision”.  Regardless of the debate, the architecture for structuring the deliverables of this group is necessary.  This sounds like some kind of workgroup focused on that problem but it does not need to consume the entire group.  Once we establish the goals based on the set of use cases we can use the vast experience of this group to come to a resolution.  

 

Forth – Infrastructure – if there is going to be “something” that is the unifying conceptual framework of specifications within this community there is going to be some infrastructure to support it.  The baseline assumption is probably RDF – but this needs to be validated or challenged.  Supporting infrastructure for global virtual development is required for the abstract thought to become a useful capability for widespread use.  

 

Finally – the semantic concepts, we will either have a baseline, integrate multiple baselines or start from scratch – but either way the process needs to start populating some set of concepts.  Lets get on with it.

 

There is a real opportunity to form a sufficiently large community of interest with some government sponsorship and management such that it becomes a magnet to become an essential and important integration point. Lets get some focus and seize that opportunity.

 

Regards,

Cory Casanave

 


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