OntologySummit2009: Standards & Ontologies

Lead Editor: Steve Ray

Purpose

• To identify a short list of existing standards or models that would lend themselves to formal remodeling (ontologizing). The rationale behind this is to bring some tangible, concrete targets into focus that, through the adoption of increased rigor in representation, would provide value to the users of the subject standards.

Scope

• Content models/standards from any domain that is familiar to a subset of the participating community.

Content

With the maturing of ontology technology, it is time to demonstrate to the user community, especially users of standards, that rigorous ontological techniques can yield more precise standards that are more easily tested, that will result in fewer interoperability errors introduced by ambiguous interpretation of the standard, and will ultimately benefit the bottom line. The standards that are identified by our community as a result of this panel will be highlighted to a broader audience, such as funding agencies, as good candidates for future work in ontologizing standards. This can catalyze the concrete, pragmatic application of ontological technologies, and could finally bring the practices and promises of formal semantics into the industrial mainstream.

As an example, CEN (European Committee for standardization) is beginning a workshop activity "Economics and Logistics of Standards compliant Schemas and ontologies for Interoperability - Engineering Materials Data" (WS/ELSSI-EMD). The first meeting of the workshop will be on the 30th March in Brussels.

The Workshop will look at standards for material testing, which often have two parts:

1. specifying which data about the test shall be recorded, and the format for doing so;
2. specifying the nature of a valid test.

It is currently envisaged that item (1) will be addressed by XML schema and schematron. This approach can also partially address item (2), but an ontology is probably a better approach for item (2). If the ontology is also used to record the data, then it may be possible to deduce whether or not a test complied with the standard.

By taking a selection of existing standards for material testing, the Workshop will investigate the practicalities of:

• including XML schemas and schematron rules within existing standards in order to provide a format for recording a test, and to apply constraints that ensure all the necessary data has been recorded;
• including an ontology within existing standards in order to define the nature of a valid test in a computer interpretable way.

The ontology will provide an additional way of recording a test. It is envisaged that XML schema based representations of the data and ontology based representations will exist side by side for the immediate future.

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This page is maintained by Steve Ray ... please contact him if there is any question.