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OpenOntologyRepository: "OOR Funding" Workshop-II - Tue 2012_08_21

Topic: "Rethinking our Funding Strategy" - Brainstorm Session

Session Chair: KenBaclawski (Northeastern University)

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  • Date: Tuesday, 21-Aug-2012
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Abstract

Topic: "Rethinking our Funding Strategy" - Brainstorm Session

While the core OOR team has kept the momentum on the Open Ontology Repository Initiative going ever since it begun in early 2008 (Big THANKS, Everyone!), the overall OOR initiative, has not had any funding even up to now, and had relied totally on volunteered effort. The progress on OOR could have been more expedient and predictable, if the entire initiative, and some of the core work, has some sort of funding to allow it to engage resources for getting things done when needed.

This is a renewed effort on getting OOR funded. Ken Baclawski, who co-lead an earlier proposal effort (our response to NSF solicitation 07-601) will continue to provide leadership and help facilitate the process.

We will use this workshop to strategize and brainstorm on how we should approach this very important question going forward. We will not confine ourselves to seeking research grants (as we had, predominantly, before) but will try to look at any and all opportunity or possibility that would help fund and make the OOR Initiative deliver the mission it had set out to accomplish.

The plan for this session is to use the time of this session as fairly open discussion on the issue. There will not be formal presentations. The chair will try to help focus our discussion.

Resources

Agenda

Session Format: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call

  • 1. Opening - chair ... [ slides ]
  • 2. Framing the issues - chair
  • 3. Q & A and open discussion [ All ]
  • 4. Summary / Next steps / Announcements - (chair)

Proceedings

Please refer to the above

IM Chat Transcript captured during the session

(for better clarity, the version below is a re-organized and lightly edited chat-transcript.)

Participants are welcome to make light edits to their own contributions as they see fit.

-- begin in-session chat-transcript --

[08:25] Peter P. Yim: Welcome to the

"OOR Funding" Workshop-II - Tue 2012_08_21

Topic: "Rethinking our Funding Strategy" - Brainstorm Session

Session Chair: Ken Baclawski (Northeastern University)

Session page: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OOR/ConferenceCall_2012_08_21

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Attendees: Ken Baclawski (chair), Bob Smith, Michael Grüninger, Mike Bennett, Mike Dean, Peter P. Yim

(scribe), Shannon Copeland, Terry Longstreth, Todd Schneider

Proceedings:

[08:25] Peter P. Yim: Hi Terry!

[08:27] Terry Longstreth: Hi Peter. Don't know what I can contribute today, but I'm curious.

[08:33] anonymous morphed into Shannon Copeland

[08:34] Bob Smith : Hi Shannon

[08:35] Mike Bennett: Hi Shannon, glad you could make it.

[08:35] Peter P. Yim: -- session started: 8:35am PDT --

[08:36] Peter P. Yim: == Ken Baclawski starts with the slides

[08:38] Peter P. Yim: slides are at:

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OpenOntologyRepository/OOR-Funding/2012-08-21_OOR-Funding-II/OOR-funding-workshop--KenBaclawski_20120821.pdf

[08:50] Peter P. Yim: see a listing of the various OOR instances, and who's on the OOR.NET network, at:

http://oor.net/index1.html

[08:58] Peter P. Yim: == open discussion begins ...

[08:59] Terry Longstreth: Project Goals (Larger scope) :

1-Show capability for fostering reuse of cataloged concepts

2-Show methodology for fusing conceptual models (i.e. Ontology interoperability - OntoIOp) and managing the evolution of fused models

3-Demonstrate feasibility of managing heterogeneous concept description languages

Unsaid - a fused ontology, derived from heterogeneous sources is (cheaper, faster, better) solution than inventing new ontology 'by hand'

[09:11] Terry Longstreth: Business Case:

Value Proposition -

Advantages of an OOR for management of concept relationships across a specific application domain

Resource requirements / Costs

Schedule

- Define business entity to manage work (foundation/consortium)

- Define transition from development to Ontology management role

- Different from open source software

- the goal is to have a sharable, manageable, evolvable knowledge base, in perpetuity.

- as concepts evolve, users are impacted

[09:23] Bob Smith : An OASIS TC has recently developed a White Paper that relates to Terry's

Management point - Transforming Government Framework (TGF) and a Pattern Language for implementing

that Framework. http://www.PeterFBrown.com summarizes the business case for TGF.

[09:24] Bob Smith : http://docs.oasis-open.org/tgf/TGF-Primer/v1.0/cn01/TGF-Primer-v1.0-cn01.pdf

[09:22] Todd Schneider: Terry, go you explain your point about 'management' further?

[09:27] Todd Schneider: We should distinguish between operating an instance of OOR and 'active'

management of the content residing in an instance.

[09:10] Peter P. Yim: role models: Apache Foundation; Linux;

[09:11] Peter P. Yim: my opinion, ideally: A Foundation with an endowment would be a great model to pursue

[09:12] Todd Schneider: What organization funded the Semantic Media Wiki work?

[09:13] Todd Schneider: Vulcan, wasn't it?

[09:13] Mike Dean: Todd: yes

[09:16] Todd Schneider: So would Vulcan be an option? I don't anything about them.

[09:13] Mike Bennett / Peter P. Yim: EDMCouncil, OMG, OASIS ... all work on a "Membership" model, where

they get their operating funding from member subscription fees

[09:18] Mike Bennett: see: http://edmcouncil.org - is a 501(c)(6) "business league" organization

[09:18] Mike Dean: EDM Council is a 501(c)(6) Business League - see irs.gov link -

http://www.irs.gov/charities/nonprofits/article/0,,id=96107,00.html

[09:17] Bob Smith : Ken - Looking at your Ontologies for Bioinformatics book - and the strong focus

on Bayesian Web - Maybe EDM - Mike Bennett might find strong interest in a mutual project??

[09:23] Mike Bennett: @Bob - indeed. We would love to work with others. In addition to the model I

described above, we are also seeking funding for those things that we can't simply do with staff

member + members' voluntary effort. Ontology integration and common reuse of standards semantics is

high on our agenda for this.

[09:18] Shannon Copeland: Please see below the Overview of Red Hat's "mission" http://www.redhat.com

which is a commercial organization that organizes and delivers open source technology to businesses

worldwide:

[09:18] Shannon Copeland: OVERVIEW

Red Hat is a global leader in providing open source software technologies to enterprise customers.

These offerings include our core enterprise operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our

enterprise middleware platform, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, as well as our virtualization, cloud, and

storage offerings and other Red Hat enterprise technologies. Our development and licensing model We

employ an open source software development and licensing model that uses the collaborative input of

a worldwide community of contributors to develop and enhance software. We actively participate in

this community-oriented development process, often in a leadership role, and leverage it to create

our Red Hat- and JBoss-branded enterprise technologies. We believe that the open source development

and licensing model offers advantages for Red Hat and our customers over proprietary software

development and licensing models. Through the open source development model, we leverage a global

community of developers and users, whose collective resources and knowledge supplement the

developers we employ. As a result, we believe we are able to offer enhancements, fixes and upgrades

more quickly and with less development cost than is typical of many proprietary software vendors. In

turn, our customers are able to take advantage of the quality and value of open source software,

which we help develop, aggregate, integrate, test, certify, deliver, maintain and support for their

enterprise use. The collectively developed software is typically distributed under open source

licenses, such as the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License, that

generally permit access to human-readable software source code. These licenses also provide

relatively broad rights for licensees to use, copy, modify and distribute open source software.

These broad rights afford significant latitude for our customers to inspect, suggest changes,

customize or enhance the software if they so choose. Red Hats participation in the

community-oriented development process is illustrated by Red Hats sponsorship role in the Fedora

Project, JBoss.org and other open source communities. This participation enables us to leverage the

efforts of these worldwide communities, which we believe allows us to reduce both development cost

and time and to enhance community acceptance and support of our offerings and technologies. Thus, we

are able to use the Fedora Project, JBoss.org and other open source communities as proving grounds

and virtual laboratories for innovations that we can draw upon for inclusion in our enterprise

technologies. Additionally, the open and transparent nature of these communities provides our

customers and potential customers with access and insights into the future direction of Red Hat

offerings and technologies. Our offerings Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an enterprise-class operating

system that runs on a broad range of hardware, including mainframes, servers, work stations and

personal computers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to meet the performance, reliability and

scalability demands of large and small enterprises, from the data center to the edge of the network

to cloud deployments. Red Hat JBoss Middleware delivers a range of middleware technologies for

developing, deploying and managing applications that are accessible via the Internet, corporate

intranets, extranets, clouds and virtual private networks. Examples of applications deployed on Red

Hat JBoss Middleware include hotel and airline reservation systems, online banking, credit card

processing, securities trading, healthcare systems, customer and partner portals, retail and

point-of-sale systems and telecommunications network infrastructure.

[09:32] Shannon Copeland: Red Hat is a Billion Dollar company now; doubled their value in the last 3 years

... theirs should be a model to consider ... they fund research and other open source project too

[09:19] Mike Bennett: OMG also has a "sponsorship" structure as well with different levels of

contributions and privileges

[09:20] Mike Bennett: Effort in development of standards, ontologies and so on, is by voluntary

member effort, in response to perceived self interest of the institution in the activities. For OMG

this might include tool vendors getting together to propose or update modeling language standards;

in the EDM Council it's an investment on their part in common resources which they can then use

(data quality matrices, data management maturity, FIBO ontology etc.).

[09:32] Bob Smith: Perhaps a review of the OOR Mission (and implicit workflow processes) is worth a minute? Project Mission (17YN)

The charter of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR) Initiative is to the promote the global use and sharing of ontologies by: (17ZH)

1. establishing a hosted registry-repository; (17ZI)

2. enabling and facilitating open, federated, collaborative ontology repositories, and (17ZJ)

3. establishing best practices for expressing interoperable ontology and taxonomy work in registry-repositories. (17ZK)

(ref. http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2008_01_03#nid16PN ) (17ZL)

... where, (19K3)

An ontology repository is a facility where ontologies and related information artifacts can be stored, retrieved and managed. (19K5)

Note that the "Open Ontology Repository (OOR) Initiative" is supposed to be an independent effort, and is only being incubated in the Ontolog collaborative work environment, for the time being.

[09:40] Peter P. Yim: [action] Shannon Copeland can help start a conversation with someone at Red Hat

[09:40] Shannon Copeland:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6200209&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=DJBW&locale=en_US&srchid=bb754128-ea60-40d6-ae4a-cff9416a43ef-0&srchindex=1&srchtotal=8532&goback=%2Efps_PBCK_john+ryan_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*2_*1_Y_*1_*1_*1_false_1_R_*1_*51_*1_*51_true_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2_*2&pvs=ps&trk=pp_profile_name_link

[09:41] Shannon Copeland: John Ryan Director, Global Business Development at Red Hat

[09:41] Todd Schneider: Have to. Good hunting.

[09:41] Todd Schneider: Oops, have to go.

[09:41] Mike Dean: another possibility is to join a foundation ... e.g. becoming an Apache Incubator

Project ... for infrastructure and visibility (more than for funding)

[09:43] Mike Dean: http://apache.org/foundation/

[09:43] Mike Dean: Andy Seaborne of Jena is VP, W3C Relations

[09:46] Peter P. Yim: [action] Mike Dean will take a lead to explore the above possibility

[09:49] Peter P. Yim: archives of material relating to our past NSF grant proposal are at:

Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/

&

Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/community/project/OOR/nsf07601/

Need authenticate to access info:

> username = oor-nsf07601

> password = ***

[09:49] Terry Longstreth: Have to leave -- Good Luck

[10:00] Michael Grüninger: ref. "Project Description" writeup included in

http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/2008-11/msg00052.html

[10:01] Michael Grüninger: this writeup -

http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/oor-nsf07601/2008-11/pdfep53cnnQZZ.pdf - is still quite relevant

[10:05] Peter P. Yim: [action] Ken Baclawski will review the past proposal documents (the "Project Description"

writeup especially) and update that, so we have something everyone can use or borrow from

[10:01] Shannon Copeland: Thank you. I have to sign off. Great meeting.

[10:06] Bob Smith : Another call - Thanks,

[10:07] Peter P. Yim: next meeting focused on funding - possibly Oct-30 (that's the next open OOR

meeting slot); Ken will decide and announce later. We can definitely talk about this some more

during the regular monthly team conf calls at the beginning on Sep-4 and Oct-9 too.

[10:08] Peter P. Yim: great meeting!

[10:08] Peter P. Yim: -- session ended: 10:07am PDT --

-- end of in-session chat-transcript --

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4.1 Action items:

  • ...

4.2 Schedule Next Meeting & Adjourn:

  • Call adjourned at: 10:07 am PDT

--

notes taken by: Peter P. Yim / 2012.08.22-16:44 PDT

All participants, please review and edit to enhance accuracy and granularity of the documented proceedings.