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