re: Will a Universal Data Element Framework [UDEF] Class of Applications fit within the ebXML Semantic Registry ?

[ewallace@cme.nist.gov]

Zachary Alexander wrote:

>Will a UDEF (Universal Data Element Framework) Class of application fit
>within the ebXML Semantic Registry model? How would a Semantic Aware
>ebXML Registry support UDEF? The UDEF is an international,
>cross-industry standards effort that is developing Object and Property
>word trees that can be combined to construct semantic identifiers.
>
>[1] http://www.udef.org

I expected UDEF to come up in this group sooner or later.  IMHO it is
out of scope for this group because the trees it uses for encoding
things are not quite taxonomies.  (They are not taxonomies because the
parent-child relationships for nodes in the tree are not always
subsumption and because concepts are actually denoted by the paths
from these nodes to the root rather than the node itself). This puts
UDEF to the left of taxonomy on Leo's chart, out of the area that
could be described as Ontology or Semantic Model.

The UDEF Object tree also provides a good example of the problems of
trying to encode a large array of divergent concepts into a simple
single tree.  Some notable results are: different interpretation of
parent-child relationships even at a single parent; and multiple
occurences of the same word at different levels and in different
branches.  This makes identification of a concept difficult and keyword
searches for a concept not very interesting.  The former result points
the need for multiple kinds of relationships in conceptual models,
while the latter result points to the need to support lattices of these
relationships.

-Evan