ExpeditionWorkshop/MultipleTaxonomiesWorkshop 2004 04 28

Note: Rendition will not function, if pop-up messages are suppressed.    (HI)

Purpose: To explore the Potential and Realities of Multiple Taxonomies: How Can Citizens, Business, and Public Servants Traverse the Repositories and Workings of Government?    (59)

The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) requires all federal agencies to transform the roles and relationships among people, processes, and technology in order to become a citizen-centered government. The PMA emphasizes bringing value and productivity results to citizens, businesses, and public managers.    (5A)

How can vast government holdings, together with the stewards of these holdings, become better knowledge assets for both researchers and citizens? How can the evolution toward open standards-based, interoperable “discovery” tools multiply the value of these “intangible assets” to researchers, businesses, and interested citizens? How can we organize around “multiple meanings” to accommodate multiple perspectives, over time and across languages, while navigating “oceans of data and information”? How can the emerging technologies of the Semantic Web, Web Services, and Grid Computing improve how we organize, learn and share public “Knowledge Assets” throughout society? How can the collective understanding that emerges from this process contribute to the maturation of the Federal Enterprise Architecture and other Knowledge Management Strategies?    (5B)

Taxonomy creation has always been and will continue to be an extremely difficult task. Today, we are even more excited about building taxonomies because of the critical role they play in turning the Internet into the self-navigable and self-understandable realm of the Semantic Web. Putting taxonomy development in context, what will it take to realize the semantic promise of finding relevant information in a potentially simple way? Is there anything to learn from our previous experiences that might make this easier for us? What hidden challenges might be lurking around the corner?    (8O)

Overview of the advantages of multiple taxonomies, including how to use multiple taxonomies to search unstructured content in a manner similar to a database.    (5I)

Kevin works with large organizations to help them gain control over their content from content management through content retrieval. He has worked in many industries including power, telecom, publishing and pharmaceuticals, where he has discovered that the challenges surrounding information access are common to all industries.    (5J)

There are known practical challenges in building taxonomies and later indexing content into a taxonomy. Except for Medline, almost everywhere these stages are far from completed. Should the goal of providing categorized government information be put on hold? Raul will describe a dynamic clustering methodology that leverages indexed content at any stage of completion between 0% (e.g., FirstGov) and 99.9% (Medline) with demos on both.    (5N)

Leo is a senior artificial intelligence scientist at the MITRE Center for Innovative Computing and Informatics in Northern Virginia (http://www.mitre.org) where he leads the Information Semantics team (semantics, ontological engineering, knowledge representation).    (5P)

An introduction to the evolving Semantic Web, its languages and how they are intended to operate together. The talk discusses the components of the Semantic Web, i.e., the relationships among XML and XML Schema, Resource Description Framework/Schema (RDF/S), DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)+Ontology Inference Layer (OIL) and the new Web Ontology Language OWL, derived from DAML+OIL. The emphasis is on the higher, ontology languages, with an attempt to answer questions such as: What is RDF and how does OWL build on it? What are the three levels of OWL and what can you express at each language level?    (5Q)

This talk presents an overview of ontology, including how formal ontology compares to less formal approaches and how the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) compares to other formal ontologies. Classes of ontology-based applications are introduced. A description of first order logic is provided. Issues of the capabilities and tradeoffs in first order logic inference are explored. The SUMO is also described in detail, along with its mappings to the WordNet lexicon.    (5V)

Though the vision of the Semantic Web and the technologies that will enable it is relatively new and still evolving, the semantic information models that will populate and fuel it have long been integral to the work of knowledge-based organizations. This presentation will address key issues in understanding these semantic information models, how they are used in context, and strategies for negotiating environments where multiple heterogeneous models coexist. Among the criteria examined will be the relationship between legacy and emergent models, enterprise and community semantics, cultural and technical concepts, implicitness and explicitness, and informal and formal expression. Examples will be drawn from a large government agency.    (5W)

The CGI WG is developing recommendations to OMB on: the adoption of open standards to enable the organization and categorization of Government information in a way that is searchable electronically, including by searchable identifiers; and in ways that are interoperable across agencies. The charter also includes provide a recommendation to OMB on the definition of which Government information should be classified under the standards; and determinations of priorities and implementation schedules for agencies.    (5Z)

The Interagency Committee on Government Information was created on June 17, 2003 by OMB per the E-Government Act, section 207, "Accessibility, Usability, and Preservation Of Government Information". The Act requires the Committee to consult with interested communities; conduct studies and submit recommendations to OMB and NARA; and to share effective practices for access to, dissemination of, and retention of Federal information. This presentation describes how the Committee has organized itself for this work and the schedules and other procedures under which the work is proceeding.    (60)

Steve will summarize major issues presented during the day to stimulate the afternoon’s discussion and possible next steps. Steve is the Co-editor of ISO 13250 Topic Maps, Co-chair of Extreme Markup Languages and Consultant for Coolheads Consulting    (61)