minutes from April 6 SCM telecon

[ewallace@cme.nist.gov]

Notes from SCM TC Telecon of 6 April 2004

Attendees:
 Carl Mattocks - CHECKMi
 Farrukh Najmi - Sun Microsystems
 David Webber (aka DW) - DRRW.net
 Evan Wallace (aka EKW) - NIST

Scribe: EKW

** Notes begin about 20 minutes into meeting **

Role of Reasoning discussion:

Action EKW -  change name for ontology search supporting ontology development
to ontology search and browsing

Decision - We should make a list of prototype reasoning use cases.
   Action EKW - draft the above.


Tight binding to OWL questions:

Farrukh felt that a looser ontology language coupling would mean
thinner representation of an ontology language within the RIM.  This,
in turn, would mean that RIM could natively support only a small set of
the reasoning supported by each such language.  To get full reasoning
support would then require ontology language specific plugins.

DW - go with OWL now, and think about adding abstractions of this
later.  Such abstractions could be useful to enable non-ontologists to
interact with the semantic content of the registry.

Carl - we may need to store metadata for ontology elements stored in
the registry.


The chairs asked:  Does anyone have a problem with a tight coupling between
RIM and OWL?

 No one present did.

Evan - While noting no objection to an OWL oriented RIM, I have had 
two concerns.
1) Such a RIM would not easily support the KIF-based models of UBL 
being developed by the Ontolog Forum.  
2) What about support for an OWL compatible SW Rule language?  
While such a language is only in the proposal stage, it is a likely
extension of OWL that would provide needed expressivity for describing
business entities.

(later) Farrukh - The ultimate tight binding with RIM would be to reimplement
RIM in OWL.

Completeness of use cases and next steps:

Farrukh -

 Goals (should go in preamble of Scenario and Use Case document)

 1 - ontology search, browsing, management and development
 (i.e. build and discover ontologies in a collaborative distributed
 environment) (see use cases 8 and 3)

 2 - to be able to use such ontologies to describe content in a
 semantically more meaningful way. (see use cases 4, 5, 9)

 3 - Discover and understand content in semantically richer ways. (see
 use case 6)

Action Farrukh - create the first draft of our Scenario and Use Case
document!!!

Question for group to think about: What are the ramifications of a
tight binding (on the RIM, and on representing other ontology languages)?

Meeting adjourned at 2:30 PM EDT.