RE: [regrep-semantic] Blurb about SCM Work (For Interview)

["Jeff Pollock" <Jeff.Pollock@networkinference.com>]

Farrukh, et al.

This has been a fascinating thread to follow. Over the course of the
past couple weeks I have been consciously disengaging to this group
because of what I perceived as a soft commitment to OWL and, more
importantly, a soft commitment to actual 'semantic capabilities' -
beyond simply storing ontology and defining mappings to RIM concepts.

However, if this group's statements (albeit, some have been removed)
during this thread about a commitment towards (1) data harmonization,
(2) semantic web server of the future, (3) precise content discovery,
and (4) semantic web services are indeed the intention for the SCM group
- then I have misunderstood the direction thus far.

It seems to me that the charter is loose in regard to the visionary
statements made on this thread and that internal fractures to SCM have
misdirected the effort away from the vision I am hearing folks describe
today.

Recently, with this group's statements, and with the compelling work
presented by professor Dogac on Tuesday, I am inclined to offer a few
thoughts about Network Inference's position with respect to this RegRep
SCM work.

First, I want to state the obvious ... Network Inference is a technology
vendor that is highly committed to the widespread use and adoption of
all OWL, and in particular OWL-DL.  With regard to our participation
here, we do not wish to be perceived as too vendor-centric with our
thoughts, instead we want to be supportive and share ideas about our
vision and implementation of OWL-based semantic tools.

Second, our position is that we strongly favor a tight binding between
OWL and the RegRep RIM interfaces.  This position is clearly influenced
by my first point, but most importantly, we favor this tight binding
because we feel that it will enable a new generation of tools to
directly interact with a regrep implementation to provide valuable
semantic capabilities (inference, mediation, dynamic workflow, etc.)
without requiring kludgy/lossy adaptors to move between ontological
representations.  This pluggability of semantic tools is crucial, in our
opinion, to making the regrep relevant for next-gen Semantic Web
Services capabilities.

Third, our expertise and early customer implementations with OWL should
be valuable, to this SCM group, but in a 'tightly-bound OWL/regrep'
scenario.  We have built Xquery and WSDL/SOAP interfaces to an OWL/RDF
inference engine that allows users to merge, inference across, and query
instances or classifications within inferred and told OWL/RDF models.
Without getting into implementation specifics (Abox,Tbox,performance
metrics etc.) about the inference engine - it should be apparent that
our interfaces (Xquery and OWL manipulation) could have some relevance
to this SCM effort. As we drill into certain use cases this could become
useful, but only when/if the binding is tighter.

Finally, I want to share with you some technical use cases for how we
are seeing people use ontologies and web services together.  With due
respect to professor Dogac's assertion that there are two primary roles
for ontologies in web services (service orchestration & ontological
reasoning), we disagree and believe that the possible roles for
ontologies is limited only by the number of architectural layers in a
web services architecture. A further distinction is that we believe that
the _only significant_ advantage for using ontologies is that you can
reason or reason across them - thus, all of our use cases leverage the
value of the precision that OWL & RDF provide in a data representation
language.  With that said, our emerging technical use cases include:

Service Orchestration - this involves the use of a reasoning engine to
enable dynamic discovery, composition and monitoring of services without
apriori codified knowledge of those services. We view OWL-S -- as it has
been most recently embodied in OWL-DL -- as the crucial enabler of these
capabilities.

Business Inferencing - this involves the use of a reasoning engine to
load multiple DL-based ontology, merge them into a common inferred model
and then query that inferred model for answers about the domain(s) that
accurately reflect the rules that have been asserted in the model (via
DL axioms).

Query Mediation - this involves the use of a reasoning engine, plus
other EAI type adapters, to mediate queries across federated sources. By
issuing queries against conceptual models that logically overlay
different physical systems (or objects inside the RIM for that matter)
vendors can build tools that reachout in native query languages and get
subsets of data from a centrally issued query.

Transformation Mediation - this involves the use of a reasoning engine
that can read ontology-based maps, in OWL-DL for example, that unify
schema/instances in a point-to-point or hub-and-spoke manner and then
resolve the physical data's incongruities as an output of the
newly-aligned schema/instance semantics found in the reasoner.

The "semantic" aspect of these use cases is two-fold (1) the metadata
precision allowed by OWL/RDF to treat relationships as first-class
objects and (2) that their context is late-bound to their execution
state.  In other words, since these capabilities (mediation, inferencing
and orchestration) are loaded "just-in-time" from models, they are
dynamic and unique at any given time.  Add in the feature that models
can change based upon the output of these capabilities, the feedback
loop is closed and you can begin to see meaningful emergent and adaptive
behavior.

To wrap up this winded email, I just want to ask for clarification
around the RegRep SCM scope and charter:

Are we in fact moving towards a position that supports the idea that
(vendor) tools *should* use a RegRep implementation _directly_ to
support semantic capabilities --- or are we going to take an
intermediary (perhaps wiser?) step to simply ensure RIM support for
ontology storage in multiple formats? (thus allowing tools to store
ontology in RegRep, but not reason directly to it)

This will help me to determine the level of involvement from our team.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Many kind regards and no offense intended to anyone,

-Jeff-



-----Original Message-----
From: Chiusano Joseph [mailto:chiusano_joseph@bah.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 10:13 AM
To: carlmattocks@checkmi.com
Cc: David RR Webber; SCM
Subject: Re: [regrep-semantic] Blurb about SCM Work (For Interview)

Great! Let's tweak these a bit for a Web Services perspective...

Joe

Carl Mattocks wrote:
> 
> small tweaks ...
> 
> Its clear that DOD and other agencies are investing heavily in  
> developing semantic based techniques to  provide consistent 
> understanding and content discovery for both eGov  and G2C
applications. One key need
> this brings up is having   * federated * registry facilities that
store
> OWL ontologies and harmonize taxonomies .   The OASIS Registry TC is
> addressing this need with their  work on Semantic Content Management 
> use cases and  industry specific scenarios
> 
> take deep breaths
> carl
> 
> <quote who="David RR Webber">
> > Joe,
> >
> > Hows this :
> >
> > "Its clear that DOD and other agencies are investing heavily in  
> > developing semantic content with OWL based techniques to  provide 
> > consistent understanding and discovery for both eGov  and G2C 
> > applications. One key need this brings up is having  central 
> > registry facilities to store and distribute from.
> >  The OASIS Registry TC is addressing this need with their  work on 
> > Semantic Content Management use cases and  specifications".
> >
> > DW
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>
> > To: "SCM" <regrep-semantic@lists.oasis-open.org>
> > Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 10:55 AM
> > Subject: [regrep-semantic] Blurb about SCM Work (For Interview)
> >
> >
> >> All,
> >>
> >> I am being interviewed by GCN (Government Computer News) next Wed. 
> >> for a dedicated Q&A session on Web Services standards. The article 
> >> will have a circulation of about 100,000 subscribers, plus the
online audience.
> >>
> >> I would like, if the opportunity areas during the interview, to 
> >> include a blurb about the work that the SCM SC is doing. So I ask: 
> >> If you could feed a reporter one or 2 sentences about this work,
what would they be?
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance!
> >> --
> >> Kind Regards,
> >> Joseph Chiusano
> >> Associate
> >> Booz | Allen | Hamilton
> >>
> >
> 
> --
> Carl Mattocks
> 
> co-Chair OASIS (ISO/TS 15000) ebXMLRegistry Semantic Content SC CEO 
> CHECKMi v/f (usa) 908 322 8715 www.CHECKMi.com Semantically Smart 
> Compendiums
> (AOL) IM CarlCHECKMi

--
Kind Regards,
Joseph Chiusano
Associate
Booz | Allen | Hamilton