Collaborative Expedition Workshop #37, December 9, 2004 at NSF    (6NA)

Toward Coherence in Knowledge Through All Things Ontological: Making Sense Together    (6OI)

Purpose/ Description    (6ND)

To explore the Potentials and Realities of Creating Public Information Environments that Strengthen Citizen-Government Relationships. How can Communities of Practice build the capacity needed for shared understanding and governance around new mission responsibilities for data stewardship and sharing? How can emerging standards-based protocols (RDF, OWL, Topic Maps) improve collaboration around problem-centered, intergovernmental scenarios? How will citizen-centered performance measures emerge from this multii-stakeholder, multi-jurisdictional process? How can the openness and freedom that characterizes sound public information environments, become a stabilizing fulcrum as contractual social interactions (activities of exchange, payment, evaluation, and institutional advancement) evolve to reflect diverse priorities of communities? What conditions facilitate interaction and participation among citizens and their governments world-wide? How can the shared understanding that emerges contribute to broad adoption of the Federal Enterprise Architecture?    (6NE)

The President's Management Agenda (PMA) requires all federal agencies to transform the roles and relationships among people, process, and technology in order to become a citizen-centered government. The PMA emphasizes bringing value and results to citizens, businesses, and government workers by "reducing the burden" and producing measurable improvement.    (6NF)

The Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference Models are emerging as an important collaborative organizing process to promote the delivery of effective, efficient services. The Data Reference Model seeks to define the data (including sharing, stewardship and provenance) associated with government services. How do communities learn how to organize around the DRM together? The SICoP, XML CoP, Ontolog Forum, Chief Architects' Forum, Common Upper Ontology Working Group, National Infrastructure for Community Statistics CoP, and Federal Geospatial Data Consortium will share insights and perspectives around this question, in light of FEA goals.    (6NG)

/VenueLogistics_2004_12_09    (6NH)

Attendees    (6NI)

1. Agenda    (6NK)

8:30 a.m. - Check-in, Lunch Order ($8.00/person) and Coffee    (6NL)

8:45 a.m. - Welcome and Introduction    (6NM)

9:30 a.m. - Summary Briefing from the Semantic Interoperability Study Group of the AIC (password required) - SusanTurnbull, Lead, BrandNiemann, OwenAmbur and other team members (to be determined)    (6NQ)

10:15 a.m. - BREAK    (6NR)

10:30 a.m.- Community Perspectives: Potentials and Realities for Building our Knowledge Sharing Capacity with Standard Vocabularies and Ontologies in Health Care and Defense    (6QP)

  ** a question was asked about metrics on the utility of an ontology on a practical problem - one paper on this is http://home.earthlink.net/~adampease/professional/cohen-aaai99.ps    (79H)

11:30 a.m. - Who is Here? Who is Missing? What's the News from CoPs?    (6QW)

12:00-1:00 PM - Networking Lunch    (6NU)

1:00 p.m. - Perspectives from Individual Innovators at the Workshop    (73M)

1:45 p.m. - Keynote Presentation: "Building ontologies from the ground up: When users set out to model their professional activity" - MarkMusen, Head of Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI) and Founder of the Protégé Project    (6R9)

Abstract: Building electronic ontologies no longer is exclusively the province of philosophers or even that of computer scientists. Professionals of all kinds increasingly recognize the importance of creating explicit, formal models of the activities and objects with which they deal in their work and of the data that drive their decision making. In business, science, and government, there are burgeoning grassroots efforts to codify human knowledge fur purposes of document retrieval, data analysis, and decision support. These pragmatic efforts are enormously important to the professional communities from which they derive. They do not always adhere to standard conventions for domain modeling or knowledge representation, however.    (71U)

In this talk, I will discuss certain grass-roots efforts to build ontologies and the effects that these efforts have had on their professional communities. There are obvious growing pains as workers most concerned about content knowledge learn to formalize that knowledge in a way that can facilitate automated information management and decision making. Professional societies, government agencies, and educational institutions can be enormously beneficial in providing resources to bolster these activities and to ensure that resulting ontologies are sound and maximally resuable. The advent of "the information society" requires the codification and dissemination of human knowledge in electronic form. The people who work closest to that knowledge are already taking major strides to build the necessary ontologies and knowledge resources.    (71V)

2:45 p.m. - Break    (6R2)

3:00 p.m. - Demonstrations of New Open Standards and Technologies in Support of Ontology Pragmatics and Interoperability of Medical Information Systems    (6RC)

4:00 p.m. - Reflections from workshop presenters and participants    (6O0)

4:15 p.m. - ADJOURN    (6O1)

2. Collaborative Expedition Workshop Series Background    (6O2)

The Collaborative Expedition workshops serve individuals and policy-makers from all sectors: government, business, and non-government organizations to practice an emerging societal form that advances realization of the citizen-centric government goal of the President’s Management Agenda. Each workshop organizes participation around a common purpose, larger than any institution, including government. By learning how to appreciate multiple perspectives around the potentials and realities of this larger “purpose”, subsequent actions of individuals representing many forms of expertise, can be expressed more effectively in their respective settings. Workshop sponsors, including, GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions, the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee of the Federal CIO Council and National Coordination Office of the Interagency Committee on IT R&D (Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development (SEW) Coordinating Group) value this “frontier outpost” to open up quality conversations, augmented by information technology, that leverage the collaborative capacity of united and diverse Americans seeking to discover, frame, and act on national potentials.    (6O3)

A key finding of the past year, is the need to apply emerging technologies (web services, grid computing, and semantic web) to tune up the innovation pipeline with better linkages among business incubators (state economic development programs), innovation diffusion networks (SBIR, angel investors, etc.) and business intelligence centers with quality information about e-government and e-commerce gaps. Many of the agile business components surfacing in the small business innovation world are not easily discovered by e-government managers, resulting in lost or delayed opportunities for both parties.    (6O4)

3. Past Workshop Archives, Collaborative Pilots, and Related Resources    (6O5)

Brief Tour of Highlights from Three Sites (click on View Now to launch control panel for pause, resume page progression, speed-up; please disable your pop-up blocker on your browser)    (6OC)

4. Upcoming Events    (6OG)