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OOR Development Session (n.09): "Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories" - Tue 2013_10_08

Session Topic: Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories: Developing a consensus for categorization of ontologies in an (Open) Ontology Repository instance

Session Co-chairs: Professor Dr. TillMossakowski (U of Magdeburg) & Professor MichaelGruninger (U of Toronto)

Briefings:

  • Dr. AleksandraSojic (U of Bremen) - "Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories" - opening brief ... slides
  • Professor MichaelGruninger (U of Toronto) - "Ontology Categories in COLORE" ... slides

In this open session ... we hope stewards of current and developing ontology repositories (folks from BioPortal, SOCoP-OOR, COLORE, Ontohub, and various OOR nodes ... and other domain ontology repositories, like, for Standards, Financial Industry Ontologies, SpacePortal, etc.) will join us in this session, share their thoughts and help develop a consensus.

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Tuesday, 8-Oct-2013
  • Start Time: 7:00am PDT / 10:00am EDT / 4:00pm CEST / 3:00pm BST / 1400 UTC
  • Expected Call Duration: ~1.5 hours
  • Dial-in:
    • Phone (US): +1 (206) 402-0100 ... (long distance cost may apply)
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        • Add the contact "joinconference" to your skype contact list first. To participate in the teleconference, make a skype call to "joinconference", then open the dial pad (see platform-specific instructions below) and enter the Conference ID: 141184# when prompted.
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  • In-session chat-room url: http://webconf.soaphub.org/conf/room/oor_20131008
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  • RSVP to peter.yim@cim3.com appreciated, ... or simply just by adding yourself to the "Expected Attendee" list below (if you are a member of the team.)
  • Please note that this session may be recorded, and if so, the audio archive is expected to be made available as open content, along with the proceedings of the call to our community membership and the public at-large under our prevailing open IPR policy.

Attendees

  • Expecting:
    • Alex Shkotin
    • ...
    • (please add yourself to the list above if you are a member of the community, or, rsvp to <peter.yim@cim3.com> with the event title/date and your name and affiliation)

Agenda Ideas

  • developing a consensus on the meta-ontology for categorization of ontologies in an (Open) Ontology Repository instance
  • ... Till Mossakowski & Michael Grüninger will be providing further details

In-session Resources

Agenda & Proceedings

Archives:

1. Meeting called to order:

  • Till Mossakowski & Michael Grüninger took the chair and welcome everyone
  • Peter P. Yim volunteered to collate the notes, but urged everyone to capture their thoughts and document them on the chat board, as usual.
  • review and adopt agenda
  • Urgent items or quick announcements

2. Roll Call:

  • welcome and intro of new member(s) (if applicable)

3. Key discussion:

3.1 Briefing-1 - "Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories (overview)" - Aleksandra Sojic

3.2 Briefing-2 - "Ontology Categories in COLORE" - Michael Grüninger

3.3 Open discussion: developing a consensus on the meta-ontology for categorization of ontologies in an (Open) Ontology Repository instance

  • Aleksandra Sojic:
    • 1. Should we foster a consensus on the (meta) categories for classification of ontologies (across OOR)?
    • 2. Should a standardisation of ontology meta-data also include categories of ontology domains?
    • 3. Action: Proposing a minimum of requirements for a meta-ontology that
      • provides interoperability across OOR categories
      • and the OOR community wants to endorse them
  • Michael Grüninger: How do domain ontologies fit into this framework?
    • ontologies like: Good Relations, FIBO, SCRIBE, Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), BioPAX, UoM, addresses, products, computer vision, enterprise modelling, ...

4. IM Chat Transcript captured during the session

see raw transcript here.

(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 --


Chat transcript from room: oor_20131008

2013-10-08 GMT-08:00


[6:57] Peter P. Yim: Welcome to the

OOR Development Session: "Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories" - Tue 2013_10_08

Session Topic: Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories: Developing a consensus for categorization of ontologies

in an (Open) Ontology Repository instance

Session Co-chairs: Professor Dr. Till Mossakowski (U of Magdeburg) & Professor Michael Grüninger (U of Toronto)

Briefings:

  • Dr. Aleksandra Sojic (U of Bremen) - "Meta-Ontology for Ontology Categories" - opening brief

Session page: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OOR/ConferenceCall_2013_10_08

Attendees: Aleksandra Sojic, Christoph Lange, DanielCoutoVale, Francesca Quattri, Henson Graves,

Julien Corman, Maria Keet, Michael Grüninger, Oliver Kutz, Pat Cassidy, Peter P. Yim, Peter P. Yim, Ray Martin,

Robert Rovetto, Till Mossakowski, Todd Schneider, Torsten Hahmann

Proceedings

[6:59] anonymous morphed into Aleksandra Sojic

[7:04] anonymous morphed into Julien Corman

[7:05] DanielCoutoVale: I cannot join the conference. Something wrong is happening to

the "joinconference" account.

[7:06] anonymous morphed into Torsten Hahmann

[7:06] Christoph Lange: The account might appear offline in Skype. I was able to dial in nevertheless.

[7:07] Peter P. Yim: @Aleksandra, Till and anyone else having trouble connecting - Please use skype-out

and dial the telephone number instead (of the "joinconference" user) of you can

[7:07] DanielCoutoVale: For me, it appears offline and the only option is to "Call Phone". There is

no "Call" as usual.

[7:09] Torsten Hahmann: Hi - I got to call in with skype by using "call" in the menu instead of the button.

[7:10] Maria Keet: I keep on being disconnected (but that's also for the chatroom, so its not due to skype)

[7:11] anonymous morphed into Pat Cassidy

[7:16] Christoph Lange: [in response to PeterYim's query on whether the work Christoph Lange is committing

to the OOR-Ontohub-API github repository would be good material for the next OOR-Hackathon session]

Summary: I don't currently have time to follow all OOR activities full-time. But my connection to

Till is reliable. Whenever something needs to be done where I can help (such as the stuff I prepared

for today), he will let me know.

[7:16] DanielCoutoVale: I'm in.

[7:20] Christoph Lange: Till will be with us in a few minutes.

[7:20] Maria Keet: sorry, but the network isn't handling the voice well. I'd like to participate a

next time, and in the meantime can provide input via email w.r.t. ROMULUS and our experiences with

the metadata.

[7:21] Peter P. Yim: sorry about this, Maria ...

[7:22] anonymous morphed into Francesca Quattri

[7:21] Peter P. Yim: == Michael Grüninger starts the session ...

[7:24] DanielCoutoVale: Please, where is the link?

[7:25] Christoph Lange: Slides are at

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OOR/ConferenceCall_2013_10_08#nid3YFE

[7:25] List of members: Aleksandra Sojic, Christoph Lange, DanielCoutoVale, Francesca Quattri,

Henson Graves, Julien Corman, Michael Grüninger, Oliver Kutz, Pat Cassidy, Peter P. Yim, Ray Martin,

Till Mossakowski, Todd Schneider, Torsten Hahmann, vnc2

[7:26] Peter P. Yim: == Aleksandra Sojic presenting the opening brief ...

[7:29] Peter P. Yim: @Aleksandra - slide#3: what do you mean by "OOR Independent" & "OOR Aligned"

[7:33] Till Mossakowski: I think "OOR independent" means "sub-ontologies developed by specific

communtites", while "OOR Aligned" means "sub-ontologies (typically the upper part) developed

centrally by OOR"

[7:33] Henson Graves: do you include standard metadata attributes such as where it came from, who did

it, when was it done, etc.

[7:36] Peter P. Yim: @Aleksandra et al. - are most ontology repository categorization implementations

hierarchical now, or do some of them support the assignment of multiple categories to an ontology

(multiple inheritance allowed in the sturcture)?

[7:40] Michael Grüninger: Actually, COLORE is restricted to Common Logic ontologies -- I think that

OntoHub is the only effort that supports multiple ontology languages

[7:40] Todd Schneider: Are we clear on the intent of providing a categorization for OOR (or other

ontology repositories)?

[7:40] Todd Schneider: Is there a focus on 'findability' or 'search'?

[7:42] Todd Schneider: Following up on Peter's comment, would it be better to provide a lattice view?

[7:45] Till Mossakowski: Aleksandra's domain fields ontology involves multiple inheritance at a few places

[7:46] Todd Schneider: Till, how is multiple inheritance presented (i.e., visualized) to a user?

[7:48] Till Mossakowski: basically as in Protégé: classes appear multiple times in the hierarchy

[7:47] anonymous1 morphed into Robert Rovetto

[7:49] Torsten Hahmann: With COLORE we are moving in the direction of multiple classifications

("views") in addition to the main hierarchies (which are based on the set of primitive concepts &

relations). E.g. based on whether they can be reduced to others (core vs. non-core) or whether they

are generic or domain ontologies, and what larger ontologies they are part of (e.g. PSL or DOLCE). I

don't think displaying it as a lattice makes much sense.

[7:49] Todd Schneider: Till, understood (about Protege), but what would be presented on a UI (for the

repository)?

[7:56] Till Mossakowski: Todd, in the UI we present it in a similar way as Protégé does.

[7:49] Todd Schneider: What is the problem that needs to be solved?

[7:56] Christoph Lange: Seems that not everyone can hear me

[7:56] Christoph Lange: Should I type into the chat?

[7:56] Till Mossakowski: yes

[7:56] Christoph Lange: OK

[7:56] Christoph Lange: The main thing about LoLa is that it is independent from concrete ontology

languages. E.g. OMV and the BioPortal-Protege ontologies have a lot of OWL-specific things

hard-coded (classes, subproperty axioms, etc.)

[7:57] Christoph Lange: LoLa as an ontology abstracts from that, but as an _instance_ of the LoLa

ontology we also maintain a _registry_ of concrete ontology languages.

[7:57] Christoph Lange: The Lo/La (Logic/Language) level of LoLa can be seen here:

http://www.slideshare.net/langec/linked-open-geodata-and-the-distributed-ontology-language-a-perfect-match/26

[7:58] Christoph Lange: The inner-ontology level can be seen here:

http://www.slideshare.net/langec/the-distributed-ontology-language-dol-use-cases-syntax-and-extensibility/10

What we show here is not exactly an excerpt from the LoLa ontology, but from the Ontohub

database schema, which is modelled after LoLa. (One minor thing is obsolete: we now call "entity" "symbol".)

[8:00] Christoph Lange: Yesterday I reviewed the OMV, BioPortal, Protege, etc. ontologies, which

Aleksandra has imported into the current draft of the "Ontohub Metadata Ontology", and came up with

some concrete ideas for aliging LoLa to the former ones:

https://github.com/ontohub/OOR_Ontohub_API/issues (most of the issues so far deal with this; maybe I

should assign further tags to them to keep alignment tasks separate from other tasks).

[8:01] Christoph Lange: The question from an Ontohub perspective is: We could do without OMV etc.; we

could simply "steal" the best ideas from OMV and incorporate them into LoLa. However if we agree

that OMV etc. will be of interest to other OOR repositories (maybe particularly the OWL-specific

ones), we should rather aim at backwards compatibility and thus at an alignment.

[8:02] Christoph Lange: For Ontohub's core purpose (managing ontologies across languages/logics),

LoLa is more precise in any case. But LoLa is currently missing

metadata/repository/maintenance-related vocabulary, which does exist in OMV etc.

[8:02] Christoph Lange: That's it for now about LoLa :-)

[8:03] Christoph Lange: Oh, the full background about LoLa is available here:

http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~till/papers/womo2012.pdf

[7:58] Peter P. Yim: == Michael Grüninger presenting "Ontology Categories in COLORE" ...

[8:02] Michael Grüninger: [the other view on how ontologies are categorized in COLORE]

- see: http://stl.mie.utoronto.ca/colore/org.html

[8:05] Pat Cassidy: Michael: re slide 2 -- in addition to those two characteristics, it could be important

to specify *how* an ontology is used, i.e. is it used in some application(s), and if so, which?

[8:06] Peter P. Yim: == open discussion ...

[8:08] Christoph Lange: If there are any questions about SKOS, I'll be happy to answer them. For now

we have a GitHub issue about this:

[8:09] Christoph Lange: https://github.com/ontohub/OOR_Ontohub_API/issues/6 - in a nutshell: I think

1. SKOS is semantically more appropriate for domain categories. 2. a lot of category schemes (e.g.

librarians') exist in SKOS already, accessible on the Web, and can be linked to.

[8:10] DanielCoutoVale: I would like to comment on search and findability

[8:12] Till Mossakowski: Peter, you can assign multiple categories in Ontohub

[8:16] Till Mossakowski: where can I find more about the difference between search and findability?

[8:18] Peter P. Yim: @Todd - how about "discoverability" ... that too, I think (or is that synonimous

with one of those two - "search" and "findability"

[8:22] Todd Schneider: The enterprise search crowd views discoverability as an aspect of search, a by-product.

[8:21] Peter P. Yim: looks like the topic today has two prongs - should we be dealing with the two

issues - "metadata" and "UI" - separately

[8:29] Michael Grüninger: @Peter -- the two issues are merged if we are developing a UI that is

driven by metadata

[8:29] Peter P. Yim: sounds great, Michael!

[8:21] DanielCoutoVale: I would like to place the question again about the function of the

categorisation.

[8:22] Christoph Lange: In my review (see GitHub issues) I found nothing really in OMV that

I _disagree_ with. Just lots of aspects where OMV is insufficient.

[8:23] Christoph Lange: @TillMossakowski: good point about OMV restricting dual licenses. My view was

that on a higher level I found nothing to disagree with; but certainly there might be finer details

that we don't accept.

[8:23] Francesca Quattri: the topic is highly interesting. Maybe the best way to find out the

difficulties that users may find in searching ontologies might be solved by asking the users

themselves. I know that some unis here run surveys online to work on more user-friendly search

systems. questionnaires are also run via crowdsourcing.

[8:23] Francesca Quattri: our community is quite large, maybe we can run a survey of the major

encountered difficulties

[8:26] Ray Martin: For many topics there are multiple dimensions or viewpoints. Take the topic of

life safety - one could develop an ontology of the fundamentals, a scientific perspective. Others

may need an engineering perspective. and yet others would utilize a business ontology. i know there are

times when i would like to know this type of categorization prior to delving deeply into a given ontology.

[8:30] Francesca Quattri: @Ray. exactly. Alexandra made a good point with Arabic. Let's say one is

not interested in all the categories presented in the slides, but let's say in specific ones (even

in relation with other languages). the width and depth of the ontology might change considerably.

[8:32] Todd Schneider: How could 'tags' be coupled to a 'better' classification?

[8:33] DanielCoutoVale: about keyword tagging

[8:33] Todd Schneider: How to go. Thank you.

[8:33] Christoph Lange: SKOS provides means for connecting keywords to a topic hierarchy

[8:33] Michael Grüninger: @Torsten -- is this a meta-ontology or a folksonomy for ontology description

[8:34] Torsten Hahmann: more of a folksonomy - let it grow through how people annotate ontologies

[8:34] Christoph Lange: http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/REC-skos-reference-20090818/#labels

(notice, e.g., skos:hiddenLabel - something that's never displayed, but accepted as a query string)

[8:35] Francesca Quattri: @Torsten: it might be also interesting to let it grow through what users

are looking after/search

[8:36] Francesca Quattri: @Daniel: basically what Daniel is saying. Using frequency

[8:37] Torsten Hahmann: @Francesca: I totally agree - not just the ontology owner/devleoper should be

able to tag, but also all users; they provide probably better tags (how they found it)

[8:38] Francesca Quattri: @Tosten: agreed. Also thinking that developers might estimate a

tag/category, users relate the choice -even semantic one for the tag- to their need.

[8:38] Christoph Lange: Let me type. I think SKOS answers many of our questions.

[8:38] Christoph Lange: It allows for combining a formal category hierarchy with informal labels

[8:39] Christoph Lange: As soon as we represent "folksonomy tags" with URIs, we can link them to an

existing SKOS scheme

[8:45] DanielCoutoVale: Documenting my comment: the kind of user interaction that we want to allow

is dependent on whether we have a folksonomy or a controlled taxonomy. On the one hand, because

users tend to be unsure about the tags that would promote their content or be confident in the wrong

direction, suggesting the most commonly searched and used tags to the annotator and suggesting the

existent tags to the searcher might be a necessary convergence step if we go for an open set of

tags. On the other hand, not offering the freedom of choosing any tag might allow us to offer other

kinds of user face interaction which are not text fields.

[8:41] Francesca Quattri: hey Everyone, thanks, great talk!

[8:41] Christoph Lange: Thanks, bye!

[8:--] Michael Grüninger: would be good to have a "Metadata" session to follow-up on today's discussion

[8:42] Peter P. Yim: no OOR session next Tue 2013.10.15 - there will be a Common Logic (CLv2) meeting that day

[8:42] Peter P. Yim: no OOR session on Tue 2013.10.22 either, ISWC will be in session that week

[8:43] Peter P. Yim: @Michael, Todd, Ken, Till, et al. - let's work on the details about the program for

the Tue 2013.10.29 session offline

[8:44] Peter P. Yim: -- session ended: 8:41am PDT --

-- end in-session chat-transcript --

5. Action items:

  • Michael Grüninger: we should plan on having a Metadata Session as a follow-up to today's discussion

6. Any Other Business:

  • Scheduling the events/programs for the next three Tuesday OOR meeting slots

7. Schedule Next Meeting & Adjourn:

  • next Meeting
    • no OOR session on Tue 2013.10.15 & 10.22 ... we'll work up the Tue 2013.10.29 program offline
  • regular meeting start-times will be: 7:00am PDT / 10:00am EDT / 4:00pm CEST / 3:00pm BST / 1400 UTC
  • 1st Tuesdays of each month will be for OOR team regular monthly confcall - for admin/planning
  • 2nd Tuesdays of each month will be for OOR-hackathon
  • ... please mark your calendars and make sure you can come!
  • Call adjourned at: 8:41am PDT

--

notes taken by: Peter P. Yim / 2013.10.08-9:00am PDT

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


Resources

  • the Joint IAOA-OOR-Ontolog "Ontologies and Standards" mini-series:
    • 2011_10_20 - Thursday: Joint IAOA-OOR-Ontolog "Ontologies and Standards" mini-series session-1: Introducing the ISO NP 17347 "Ontology Integration and Interoperability (OntoIOp)" Standardization Effort - Co-chairs: John Bateman & Michael Grüninger - ConferenceCall_2011_10_20
    • 2011_11_03 - Thursday: Joint IAOA-OOR-Ontolog "Ontologies and Standards" mini-series session-2: Invited Speaker: Elisa Kendall on "Ontology-Related Metadata Standards" - Co-chairs: Michael Grüninger & John Bateman - ConferenceCall_2011_11_03
    • 2012_07_17 - Tuesday: Joint IAOA-OOR-Ontolog "Ontologies and Standards" mini-series session-3: "Standardisation Coordination and Ontology Repositories" - Co-chairs: Michael Grüninger & John Bateman - ConferenceCall_2012_07_17
    • 2012_09_20 - Thursday: Joint IAOA-OOR-Ontolog "Ontologies and Standards" mini-series session-4: "Common Logic" - Co-chairs: Michael Grüninger & John Bateman - ConferenceCall_2012_09_20
  • the OOR-IPR mini-series:
    • 2010_09_09 - Thursday: Joint OOR-Ontolog-NCBO-CC-IAOA-OASIS Panel Discussion - "IPR issues in Ontology and the OOR" session-1: an exposition on relevant IPR regimes - Keynote speaker: George Strawn - Chair: Peter P. Yim - Panelists: JamieClark, John Wilbanks, Bruce Perens - ConferenceCall_2010_09_09
    • 2010_09_16 - Thursday: Joint OOR-Ontolog-NCBO-CC-IAOA-OASIS Panel Discussion - "IPR issues in Ontology and the OOR" session-2: what are the IPR issues relating to open ontology repositories (and ontologies in general)? - Chair: Mark Musen - Panelists: Cameron Ross, Alan Rector, John F. Sowa, Bruce Perens, John Wilbanks, Peter P. Yim - ConferenceCall_2010_09_16
    • 2010_09_30 - Thursday: Joint OOR-Ontolog-NCBO-CC-IAOA-OASIS Panel Discussion - "IPR issues in Ontology and the OOR" session-3: discussion and consensus on licensing arrangements for the OOR Initiative, and positions we might take on related IPR issues - chair: Leo Obrst - Panelists: Peter P. Yim, Mike Dean, Bruce Perens, JamieClark - ConferenceCall_2010_09_30