RE: [tm-pubsubj] mixed feelings

["Tsao, Scott" <scott.tsao@boeing.com>]

Thank you Bernard for sharing your concerns and pleading for re-focusing on
the TC deliverables.  I have been very busy since the Seattle meeting and
was not able to keep in tune with all the (interesting and philosophical)
discussions on tm-pubsubj-comment list.  From my perspective, I have the
following thoughts:
1) The issues about "subjects" and the need for effective management of
"published subjects" seem to be of common interest and general concern
across different ontological/semantic communities (e.g., TM, RDF(S),
DAML+OIL, etc.)  The PubSubj TC could play a unique role for those
communities with a goal to enable ontological/semantic interoperability, as
testified by the desire for liaison with OWL.  As such, I do not see any
advantage of having TM added to the name of the TC.
2) I think we should continue working on some pragmatic use cases to
demonstrate and prove the value of our effort.  The ones that I see direct
connection with our work in Boeing are:
  a) Creating and managing namespaces
  b) Representing subjects for OWL (DAML+OIL initially)
3) I think the specific role TM can play and demonstrate its value is in PS
Doc, because its flexibility and intuitiveness.

Regards,

Scott Tsao
IS Architecture & eBusiness
The Boeing Company
P.O. Box 3707, MC 6H-AF
Seattle, WA 98124-2207
425-237-3337 (Voice) 425-237-3428 (Fax)
Email: scott.tsao@boeing.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Bernard Vatant [mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 5:13 AM
To: tm-pubsubj
Subject: [tm-pubsubj] mixed feelings


Folks

I've got mixed feelings those days about our TC work.

We've got lately lively and interesting debates about paradigmatic, generic,
genetic or
distributed PSIs ... but that does not make our practical work move forward
an inch I'm
afraid. A month has passed since Seattle meeting, and we have still that
bunch of issues
posted in the current Deliverable 1 version, and not a heap of proposals to
address those
issues so far.

I've been trying to review the document those days, and figure how to make
things move
forward, and all I got to is adding those new questions, about non topic
maps applications
of PSIs, or distributed PSIs ...

Some thoughts

I wonder if we've not been far too deep into the details of the "what and
how" without
having a real agreement on "why and what for". Those have been expressed in
a too fuzzy
way so far. In fact, I think there is a deep, but not clearly expressed,
disagreement on
objectives between

(1) those who consider PSIs essentially as necessary logistics for
interoperability and
wide-scale support for topic maps technology - letting the use of PSIs
outside TM universe
as a secondary and minor objective.

(2) those who consider topic maps like maybe the reference early users, but
only one among
many technologies that could use PSIs.

I've always been implicitly, and will certainly be more and more explicitly,
on the (2)
side. Remember I proposed the name of the TC to be "Published Subjects"
without explicit
reference to topic maps. But I must acknowledge I am maybe pushing against
the majority of
TC opinions there. In the first co-call on October 30, if I trust the
minutes, the
consensus was rather on (1) - Quote from the minutes below.

"Bernard asked the committee to consider whether Published Subjects should
be created with
other applications in mind or be solely dedicated to Topic Maps. After some
discussion, it
was determined that the focus should be the creation of Published Subjects
for Topic Maps,
and let initiative to other groups for other applications."

But at this meeting, only 5 of the 11 current TC members were present.

So, questions:

1. Have our objectives been defined clearly enough?

2. If yes, are we going the right way so far, or are we misled?

3. Do we have to reconsider the objectives, in the light of recent debates,
or do we stick
to the initial ones?

Thanks for your feedback


Bernard






----------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>