DomainVocabularies-session2

Number	02
Duration	2 hour
Date/Time	November 17 2016 17:30 GMT
	9:30 PST/12:30 EST
	5:30pm BST/6:30pm CET
Convener	Gary Berg-Cross

Domain Vocabularies, Ontologies and Semantics- Mini-series Session 2

This is the home page for the 2nd session in the Mini-series on "Domain Vocabularies, Ontologies and Semantics" - a Domain Vocabulary-Ontology Dialog.

About the Series:

This mini-series of events are co-organized or supported by members of the Ontolog community, Research Data Alliance community and IAOA community.

Description, Goals and Objectives

This mini-series is designed to explore the current status and application of semantic science and ontologies to systematize and leverage the already large body of domain definition work on vocabularies and their meaning. Increasingly standardizing the registration and management of domain vocabulary is needed since such terms are used as part of data/metadata documentation. As part of this controlled vocabulary are often used for indexing and retrieval of data resources. However terminologies, driven in part by early efforts, are often arbitrary with little supporting conceptualizations or real standardization. There are some cases with many dozen local standards for data which makes data integration a challenge. Despite community efforts various types of standardized vocabularies are, for the most part, heterogeneous, meaning they are mostly fragmented and disconnected. A goal of these sessions is to bring together members of various domains into a meaningful dialog. We anticipate that the sharing of problems and issues, ontological engineering architectures and approaches, and prospective tools, will enable collaborative understanding of the challenges and potential value in the application of ontology and semantics for people currently struggling with domain vocabularies.

One issue is that simple conversion to RDF form doesn't solve these problems and suitable off the shelf ontologies may not be available.

This point was made in Torsten Hahmann's talk as part of the first session:

"Existing ontologies for the water domain–and for most scientific domains–rely on conceptual models (UML diagrams) and lightweight ontologies (RDF or subclass hierarchies specified in OWL)...but subtle differences are currently not formalized and are typically only available in narrative form. This prevents use of automated integration (e.g., ontology alignment) techniques."

Also in our first session we also heard from Mark Fox on the issues with Global City Indicators, ISO 37120 standard and supporting by underlyingontology design patterns. Part of the problem in this effort is that, despite direct efforts to define terms cities lack direction on what data sets using related vocabularies should be published on their Open Data web. There is therefore a need to identify the content that needs to be published to support the analysis of their indicator performance. This requires “Ground truth” and proper meta-data which in turn needs standard ontologies for the publishing of indicator-related city data on the Semantic Web. But these are not available off the shelf and require some work to specific knowledge about:

Education, Finance, Health
City specific knowledge
- Toronto, Montreal, London and
Common conceptual elements of all indicators
- Measurement, Time, Geospatial, Statistics

All 3 speakers discussed strategies of moving to what Torsten Hahmann and Boyan Brodarick called DOMAIN REFERENCE ONTOLOGIES (DRO). These are ontologies that are:

Foundationally grounded
Providing broad coverage on the highest level in the domain: focuses on the key concepts and relations in the domain; but does not aim to capture the domain comprehensively
Specified in a highly expressive and fully machine-interpretable ontology language
- the intent is to provide “neutral” language to express semantic differences;

An important part of the DRO strategy is that we do not to directly define the scientific terms (e.g. aquifer or private school in the City Indicator topic), but the supporting ontological helper concepts and relations.

Foundations for a water body reference ontology discussed by Boyan Brodarick minimally include three structuring relations:

containment,
support, and
dependence

There are questions about other foundations needed for a water body such as parthood, movement (e.g. or rapids) and connectivity (e.g. for rain drops).

The work of all 3 speakers is ongoing but points to a family of approaches and concepts that seem needed as part of the effort to provide enhanced semantics to domain vocabularies and the current suite of domain ontologies.

Info on Our 2nd session

2016_11_17 - Thursday:

This session represents a follow to Session 1 as well as some of the things discussed at past Ontolog Forum sessions and the recent RDA Plenary 8 in Denver which included a BoF on Domain Vocabulary Development, Standardization, Registration, Harmonization and Support.

Gary Berg-Cross will moderate.

We have 4 speakers:

Simon Scheider (Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Universiteit Utrecht) will speak on the challenges he's found in ontological prerequisites for meaningful spatio-temporal analysis (maps, statistics). Slides

Abstract: The talk reflects on recent work on an ontological model for deciding whether spatio-temporal analysis tools can be applied to data sets. The goal is to capture implicit knowledge in the GIS and spatial domain in order to automate the selection of analytic views on (linked) data. I will discuss fundamental prerequisites and difficulties when using different kinds of maps and charts on data sources from the statistical portal AURIN (Australian Research Information Network), and an OWL model that can be used to cope with these problems. I furthermore present ongoing work to model the subtleties in using choropleth maps, namely the modifiable area unit problem (MAUP).

Olivier Bodenrieder (NLM/NIH) will speak on [Ontologies support semanticinteroperability in healthcare for example with SNOMED CT].

Mike Bennett (Hypercube/EDM Council) will describe the EDM Council's initiative to create a common language for the financial industry, the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). Slides (pdf) Slides (pptx)

Abstract The Financial Industry Business Ontology aims to provide a common language across the financial services industry, for use in integration, data model development, standards alignment and regulatory reporting. Mike will speak to the challenges of representing common meaning using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the methodological challenges in deriving common meaning across the financial space.

Cory Casanave (Model Driven Solutions) Cross domain sharing and federation of threat and risk information, an application of Semantic Modeling for Information Federation (SMIF a.k.a. SIMF) Presentation Slides (pdf) Slides (pptx)

Abstract There is current work in the OMG to develop a reference model of shared concepts to provide a pivot point between the many communities, technologies and data formats that are relevant to both cyber and physical threats. This can be differentiated from many efforts that try and provide a new physical "exchange standard", where as we federate exchange and analytics information sources and destinations using a conceptual reference model. In this effort we are using the "Semantic Information Modeling for Federation" (SIMF) profile of UML, also a standard moving through the OMG.

Conference Call Details

Date: Thursday, 17-Nov-2016 Start Time: 9:30am PST / 12:30pm Eastern / 6:30pm CEST / 5:30pm GMT / 1730 UTC

ref: World Clock

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Attendees

Proceedings

[12:32] AlexShkotin: Hi All!

[12:34] KenBaclawski: Announcements: The audio recording of the first session of the mini-series has been posted in case you missed the session.

[12:35] KenBaclawski: Upcoming Meetings: The first pre-launch session of the Ontology Summit 2017 will be held on 12/1. Please come with topic and track suggestions.

[12:36] KenBaclawski: Upcoming Meetings: Mike Bergman will be speaking on his new Cognonto venture on 12/8

[12:36] KenBaclawski: Upcoming Meetings: The second pre-launch session of the Ontology Summit 2017 will be held on 12/15.

[12:35] gary berg-cross: Our previous session with the audio is at: http://ontologforum.org/index.php/DomainVocabularies

[12:53] gary berg-cross: @Simon I see some nice similarity between your approach and what Mark Fox talked about for Global City Indicators last week. Are you familiar with his work?

[13:18] gary berg-cross: @Olivier I wonder if this approach of harmonizing different vocabularies through something analogous to UMLS.

[13:26] Olivier Bodenreider: @Gary: I am not familiar enough with this to comment. Sorry.

[13:27] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: Having a easily digestible user-facing approach has been quite successful in the ecology/ecosystem monitoring communities: greatly helps harvest knowledge for improved ontologies

[13:28] Donna Fritzsche4: Are there any references Pier?

[13:29] Donna Fritzsche4: Mike- are there legal contracts that represent the same information?

[13:30] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: @Donna: mostly workshops at conferences. this year's ICBO had some Noctua demos. Not sure if there are journal articles.

[13:30] gary berg-cross: @MikeB Are there any revisions to how you think of the Conceptual Model based on last week's presentations on domain reference ontologies which describe the supporting ontological helper concepts and relations in Finance?

[13:31] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: +1 to the need to distinguish data from bona fide entities - without this, havoc is not far away

[13:34] Donna Fritzsche4: thanks!

[13:35] Simon: @Mike: I totally agree that grounding (of), formalism, and purpose are largely independent dimensions, more than was envisioned by model theorists...

[13:37] Cory Casanave: Subject of model; thing/data is a primary source of confusion and error. This is the referent of the model element.

[13:43] gary berg-cross: @Mike I think that Simon might have some useful things to say about your reference ontology topic.

[13:52] gary berg-cross: Lots to discuss about this view of Conceptual (Typically social constructs?) vs. Pragmatic (data signatures that indicate something exists in the world) ontologies.

[13:56] ToddSchneider: Soory Cory, have to go. Thank you.

[13:56] gary berg-cross: It seems important to share the lessons and experience that it takes to "integrate" these various, federated models. Simon showed a bit of what might go into this in the spatial domain.

[13:59] gary berg-cross: BTW, people may be interested in our upcoming workshop at the UMDS. This year's VoCamp will take place at the Center for Geospatial Information Science of the University of Maryland starting at 9 on Tuesday, Nov. 29th and conclude early afternoon (around 2 to allow travel) Dec.1st. See http://vocamp.org/wiki/GeoVoCampDC2016#What_Topics

[14:04] gary berg-cross: @Cory I would imagine that someone like Torsten would call your Threat and Risk model a Domain Reference Ontolog.

[14:06] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: @Cory I'd be very interested to know where you get your standard defs for threats, risks, etc. In the systems I work with, these terms lead to a dubious part of a semantic zoo.

[14:07] gary berg-cross: @Pier +1 We definitely should discuss this.

[14:14] Cory Casanave: Pier; Lots of sources - mostly referenced in the document. WOuld be happy to discuss

[14:14] Cory Casanave: Have had to do a lot of zoo keeping

[14:15] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: Cory: great! We're tackling this for some UN processes and can probably learn a lot from the practicality of the tactical world

[14:17] gary berg-cross: Q from Simon on grounding approach, which is more familiar vs something generated via internal consistency.

[14:19] Cory Casanave: Pier: Would be noce to bring the processes together

[14:21] AlexShkotin: Thank you All.

[14:21] gary berg-cross: Pier Q on ambiguity - people disagree in the domain. How do you handle this? Olivier addressed this starting with diff of granularity. Lots of things are lumped together since we didn't have evidence for distinctions. Such as constellation of diseases hiding under on label of disease.

[14:22] gary berg-cross: So we are working with evolving ontologies. So don't over commit.

[14:22] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: @Olivier: many thanks - I like the idea of being able to trace ambiguity being resolved as more expertise is brought in

[14:24] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: @Cory - +1 for catching them all, in the Environment Ontology, we're trying to handle (for example) 1800 official definitions of forest

[14:27] Cory Casanave: :) - 1800 concepts of forest!

[14:27] gary berg-cross: Pier can you tell us a bit more about your Envo work?

[14:30] Pier Luigi Buttigieg: Here's a recent update paper on ENVO: http://jbiomedsem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13326-016-0097-6

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