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Organization

• Co-Chairs: Ken Baclawski and Mike Bennett
• Program Committee: Leo Obrst, Kurt Conrad and Peter P. Yim

Tentative Schedule

• 1:30 - 1:45 Technical issues and participant introductions (if audience is small enough).
• 1:45 - 1:50 Mini-Series Introduction (KenBaclawski)
• 1:50 - 2:30 Mike Bennett - EDM Council Semantic Repository - http://www.hypercube.co.uk/edmcouncil/
• 2:30 - 3:10 MikeBergman - UMBEL - http://www.umbel.org/
• 3:10 - 3:25 General discussion
• 3:25 - 3:30 Wrap-up (KenBaclawski)

Deadlines

• Confirmations: 2008.09.04 (i.e., ASAP)
• Title & Abstract: 2008.09.11
• Presentation Materials (slides): 2008.09.18

Titles and Abstracts

The GoodRelations Ontology: Making Semantic Web-based E-Commerce a Reality - MartinHepp

Abstract: A promising application domain for Semantic Web technology is the annotation of products and services offerings on the Web so that consumers and enterprises can search for suitable suppliers using products and services ontologies. While there has been substantial progress in developing ontologies for types of products and services, namely e[[ClassOWL]], this alone does not provide the representational means required for e-commerce on the Semantic Web. Particularly missing is an ontology that allows describing the relationships between (1) Web resources, (2) offerings made by means of those Web resources, (3) legal entities, (4) prices, (5) terms and conditions, and (6) the aforementioned ontologies for products and services.

In the talk, I will explain the need and potential of the GoodRelations ontology, introduce its key conceptual elements, highlight several lessons learned, and summarize design decisions wrt to modeling approaches and the appropriate language fragment, which may be relevant for other ontology projects, too.

UMBEL: A Lightweight Subject Reference Structure for the Web - MikeBergman

Abstract: (... coming!)

The EDM Council Semantics Repository: Building global consensus for the Financial Services Industry - MikeBennett

Abstract: This session will present the semantics model created by Hypercube for the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council).

The EDM Council is a not-for-profit global industry association in the financial services sector, providing support for firms looking to focus on the business management of data. To this end they have commissioned a semantics repository in order to achieve an industry consensus view of terms in the industry, which would be owned and validated by business rather than technology.

The Semantics Repository has been built primarily to identify individual meaningful terms. We have implemented this based on the OWL ontology language, but with certain important departures. This introduction to the Repository will focus on those aspects of the repository design. An important commitment of this model is that it must be reviewable by business subject matter experts with no prior exposure to any modeling language or format.

A key feature of the Repository is the terms not specific to the financial services world. These are identified as "Global Terms" in the repository and form the basis of an upper ontology, from which the industry-specific terms have been derived. This has been richly structured, for example using the upper level classes identified in Dr John F Sowa's Knowledge Representation (KR) ontology lattice. In so doing we believe we have solved a number of definition problems that are prevalent in the financial services industry, such as the identification of roles and parties in securities transactions and issuance.

This is very much a work in progress and we are keen to align with best practice in the format and structure, and with existing global or upper ontology terms where we can match these to the structure used in this model.