In order
to help us make progress at the FTF on our requirement to select a value set
schema and define a set of associated APIs to define, publish, manage and
navigate these value sets, I’m providing for purpose of example 3 different
value sets: the uddi-org:types value set; an excerpt of the MS Business
Capabilities Classification Scheme [3]; and an excerpt of the MS MapPoint
Geographic Context Hierarchy [4]. Two of these [3, 4] are available from
Microsoft in its UDDI Services Extensions schema format [1, 2] (which I’m
familiar with due to past experience). I’ve also formatted these three iaw an
OWL schema I’ve created (…rather blindly due to the lack of adequate tooling and
sufficient background in RDF/OWL). My purpose for doing so is to demonstrate
different means of representing value sets; there are clearly many other
alternative representations. The
intent is to allow us to discuss concretely the merits of one
approach over another (and others), and then use these as practical examples
from which we can start developing supporting APIs.
Notes 1: The MS UDDI Services schema [1], descriptive
text [2], and value set files [3, 4] are available for download from
Microsoft. This does not constitute an IP contribution on my part
as I clearly have no right to do so; I’m simply making reference to
material available to the public on the MS site. Please note that these files
are copyrighted by Microsoft with all rights reserved.
Notes 2: The OWL schema I toyed with is likely full of
errors as I could not obtain adequate tooling. I’d gladly accept input and
help from OWL experts (Katia, Massimo????). What I’m providing will probably
suffice for the purpose of our discussion at the FTF. We may also possibly
leverage it as part of semantic search discussions - once a requirements document is submitted and its
requirements prioritized.
OWL Schema
Description
The OWL
schema I created is contained in the “valueset.owl” file (attached). To the best
of my current understanding of OWL, it limits itself to OWL-Lite.
The
schema defines two classes: a valueSet class and a vsEntry class. The valueSet
class has a set of properties including: 1) a name, 2) a description or 3) a
choice of {tModelKey, tModel}. The idea of having either tModel or tModelKey is
to allow the ability to load a value set along with its associated tModel
definition (useful in bulk import cases), or the value set and a reference to a
pre-existing tModel (useful to update existing value sets). Note that I did not
figure out how using OWL Lite I could express a choice of {tModel,tModelKey};
its one or the other, not both that are intended to be allowed.
The
vsEntry class defines a triple of: value (i.e. keyValue); title (i.e. keyName);
and parentValue (i.e. of the hierarchical parent’s ID – typically a keyValue).
OWL allows extending this set of properties by subclassing the vsEntry class;
using this technique, the “isValid” attribute used in the MS Schema for example
could be added as a property of a class derived from vsEntry.
You
should note the following:
- The OWL-version of the MS MapPoint value set
has a title element that can be expressed in multiple
languages (i.e. French and English in the example provided); this approach may
help our I18N requirements
- Note that in the case of the rdf:ID attributes used for the
MS MapPoint and MS Business Classification schemes are numeric which does not
conform to allowable usage of rdf:ID. It is an open issue what to recommend to
use as ID attribute values. Perhaps we should recommend a concatenation of xxx
(e.g. a tModelKey) and the vs:value element.
- I have not demonstrated equivalencies (e.g. ISO3166’s
“ca” country value as equivalent to that of MS MapPoint’s “someNumber” value
for Canada), though OWL would allow us to do
so.
I’d like
to reiterate that the purpose of this mail is to help discussion of this very
important topic before us. I hope this material can be of some use to us next
week at the FTF.
Luc
NB: I’d
appreciate some assistance on the OWL schema.
[1]
Microsoft Extensions Schema, http://uddi.microsoft.com/extension.xsd
[2]
Traversing the Tree: Using the get_relatedCategories API in UDDI Services,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnuddi/html/travtreeuddi.asp
[3] Microsoft Business
Capabilities Classification Scheme, http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=16851
[4] Microsoft MapPoint
Geographic Context Hierarchy, http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=16852