Draft Minutes of ICOM TC Meeting, August 19, 2009

Minutes of ICOM TC Meeting, August 19, taken by Eric S. Chan

Agenda

1. Roll Call

2. Approve draft minutes from July 22 TC Meeting

3. Draft model of community and workspace

4. AOB

1. The following eligible members were present

Deirdre Lee

Laura Dragan

Philip Arkcoll

Ramesh Vasudevan

Rafiul Ahad

Eric Chan

2. Draft minutes from July 22 TC Meeting was approved.

3. Draft model of community and workspace.

In a discussion thread that followed the meeting minutes from July 22 TC Meeting, Eric suggested that ICOM can represent an upper ontology for integration of existing ontologies. Deirdre and Laura questioned about the notion of upper ontology. Eric obliged to look up the definition and usage of upper ontology (please see the addendum a below). Deirdre and Laura indicated that SIOC has been used as canonical ontology (representation) for integration in Ecospace project. Eric replied that ICOM is also positioned as a canonical representation for integration, to reduce the complexity of integration from n x m (point-to-point integration between each pair of supplier and client) to n + m (each supplier and client integrates with ICOM). Unlike SIOC, which is defined primarily in RDF, ICOM will be defined from the outset for representation simultaneously in UML/OO and RDF and for transformation between the two representations.

Participants will start with a minimal model of community, workspace, and a few high-level concepts to be represented simultaneously in UML/OO and RDF and to define the mappings between the two representations. For example, shall we assume that a property in RDF has the cardinality of 0 or 1 unless the range of the property is explicitly specified as rdfs:bag or rdfs:list to allow the cardinality greater than 1. Eric recalled a discussion with Stefan Decker about identifying richer schema extensions to RDFS for ICOM (please see the addendum b below). The schema extensions can enable more direct matching between RDF representation of ICOM and UML/OO representation of ICOM.

4. AOB

The meeting was adjourned.

Addendums

An excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_ontology_(information_science):

“In information science, an upper ontology (top-level ontology, or foundation ontology) is an ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all domains. The most important function of an upper ontology is to support very broad semantic interoperability between a large number of ontologies accessible "under" this upper ontology. As the metaphor suggests, it is usually a hierarchy of entities and associated rules (both theorems and regulations) that attempts to describe those general entities that do not belong to a specific problem domain.”

[Eric’s comments] Some general concepts of upper ontology are time, location, event, number, and artifact that cross-cut many domains. Collaboration is an activity that cross-cuts many business processes. In this respect, ICOM may represent an upper ontology for many business application domains.

An excerpt from http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/, section 5.5 Richer Schema Languages:

“RDF Schema provides basic capabilities for describing RDF vocabularies, but additional capabilities are also possible, and can be useful. These capabilities may be provided through further development of RDF Schema, or in other languages based on RDF. Other richer schema capabilities that have been identified as useful (but that are not provided by RDF Schema) include:

· cardinality constraints on properties, e.g., that a Person has exactly one biological father.

· specifying constraints on the range or cardinality of a property that depend on the class of resource to which a property is applied, e.g., being able to say that for a soccer team the ex:hasPlayers property has 11 values, while for a basketball team the same property should have only 5 values.”

[Eric’s comments] Stefan Decker had discussed about identifying richer schema extensions to RDFS for ICOM.

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