[xtm-wg] Re: Open Source Ontology project

[bryan@cog-tech.com]

Scott,

This project has more of a community and knowledge management focus. 
 
Lars has done great things with the free XML tools topic map.  (Are 
you listening Lars?  Thanks!).  I definitely want to coordinate these 
efforts.

These are some of the characteristics that define this project:

Domain: open source projects and standards.  If successful, the site 
will create an incentive for commercial vendors to participate by 
describing their own products.  This will help systems integrators 
choose mixtures of open and closed source projects to meet their 
needs.

Population: developers, programmers, end users, systems designers, 
integrators, and management.

Extensibility: base ontology for describing project; extended by 
specific communities (e.g., the database community).

Locus of control: the community not the maintainer.  Lars has moved 
this way with XSA, which exports control to the software developers.  
However I would like to enable web-based editing of the topic map, 
which is necessary if at large populations other than the maintainers 
to contribute information.  Distributed control is a key attribute of 
open source efforts.

Managing goals and relationships: support for expressing and managing 
the goals of a project, its relationship to other projects, and to 
standards (which Lars does cover).  This information is important for 
all populations.  Especially, it can facilitate the adoption of open 
source projects by systems integrators, and help to enhance the open 
source projects with contributions of those integrators back to the 
projects as they add or improve features.

Work flow: success means being integrated into the work flow of open 
source projects.  For example:

o	A view on a project's home page into the topic map
        description of that project

o	A CVS logging tool that helps developers identify the impact
        of changes that they are committing in terms of the project
        goals and milestones as described in the topic map.

I am very interested in how technology can support distributed 
planning and decision making by communities.  When you expose any 
information product to a community process, the community needs tools 
to deal with the conflicting, incomplete and unreliable information.  
This is isomorphic to the problem of the individual decision maker, 
who must manage conflicting, incomplete and unreliable information to 
interpret their world and make decision.  Cognitive Technologies 
(http://www.cog-tech.com) has focused its research on how people 
manage uncertainty.  We are applying these cognitive models to create 
technologies that support collaborative knowledge management by 
web-based communities.

-bryan


--- In xtm-wg@egroups.com, "Scott Tsao" <tsao@g...> wrote:
> --- In xtm-wg@egroups.com, bryan@c... wrote:
> > Guy Lukes (lukesg@f...) and I (bryan@c...) are interested
> > in developing an extensible ontology / topic map to describe open
> > source projects.  Eventually we see this as a knowledge management
> > tool to support the search for, and coordination, of expertise and
> > information on open source projects.
> > ....
> > > What is the state of the art here?  Ideally this project would 
be
> > developed with open source software, but we would be willing to
> > conduct the project using closed software as well (any offers?).  
I
> > might suggest that this project, if successful, would have a 
fairly
> > high profile and could create some practical interest in topic 
maps
> > within a broad and informed community.
> > 
> Other than being a topic map describing open source projects, I 
> wonder how would this be different from Lars Marius Garshol's "Free 
> XML tools and software" site 
> (http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/) that has been 
> implemented in Topic Maps 
> (http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/xmltools-tm.xml).  As 
> the demand for free XML tools increases, a site that allows 
> developers to easily describe and discover free XML software should 
> have a similar effect in promoting interest in Topic Maps within
the 
> software development community.
> 
> Scott Tsao


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