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Thoughts on Hosting an Thoughts on Hosting an Ontology and Vocabulary Ontology and Vocabulary Repository at OMGRepository at OMG

Evan K. Wallace – co-Chair OMG Ontology PSIGManufacturing Systems Integration DivisionNIST

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OMG’s Mission Since 1989

Develop an architecture, using appropriate technology, for modeling & distributed application integration, guaranteeing: reusability of components interoperability & portability basis in commercially available software

Specifications freely availableImplementations existMember-controlled not-for-profit

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Who Are OMG?

Accenture

Appian Corp.

BAE Systems

BEA Systems

BluePhoenix

Boeing

CA

Capgemini

CitiGroup

Cordys

CSC

DND Canada

EDS

FireStar

Fujitsu

General Dynamics

GSA

HP

Harris

Hitachi

HSBC

IBM

IDS Scheer

John Deere

Know Gravity

Lombardi

MetLife

NIST

Northrup Grumman

No Magic

Oracle

Penn National

Sandpiper Software

SPARX

SAP

TeleLogic

Tibco

Vangent

VISA

W3C

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A sampling of OMG specifications

Common Object Request Broker Architecture - CORBA®Unified Modeling Language - UMLTM

Common Warehouse Metamodel – CWMTM

Information Management Metamodel – IMM (in process)Meta-Object Facility - MOFTM

XML Metadata Interchange – XMITM

Business Process Modeling Notation – BPMNProduction Rule Representation - PRRSemantics for Business Vocabularies and Rules - SBVROntology Definition Metamodel – ODM

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need for utility ontologiesWe are increasingly asked for “foundational”, “core”, or “utility” ontologies representing

Various IEEE, ANSI, ISO, & other standard vocabularies, both general (e.g., currencies) & domain-specific (ACORD standards for Property & Casualty Insurance business vocabulary)

Metamodels, conceptual as well as logical, related to OMG standards (for SOA, event-driven architectures)

Where multiple artifacts are provided in the same repository Ontology Definition Metamodel (

http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ptc/2007-09-09) ontology & vocabulary formats: ODM/XMI for RDF, OWL, CL, Topic Maps with native forms

Semantics for Business Vocabularies & Rules (SBVR) equivalents, http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?dtc/2007-06-06

Mappings to production rules standards, such that the same vocabulary can be reused for rule generation: PRR (Production Rules Representation), http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?bmi/07-06-06

slide provided by Sandpiper Software

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reuse challenges varyOntologies developed for programs such as the DARPA DAML program are aging

Ontology pages have not been revised since 2004 (see http://www.daml.org/ontologies/)

Most recent submission was actually in 2003 (see http://www.daml.org/ontologies/submission.html)

Community knowledge about development methodology & facts about the world relevant to the IC community have continued to evolve

Many ontologies are developed for a specific purpose: domain or application oriented, but development assumptions that could impact reuse are not made explicit

Research ontologies tend to be focused on demonstration-related content and are by nature incomplete, with varying coverage and levels of granularity due to funding limitations

More recent ontologies available via the Protégé library are better documented, but many are also domain specific

slide provided by Sandpiper Software

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Potential OMG conceptual repository content

For SBVR Foundational Vocabularies:Time and dateMonetary amountLocationUnits of measureQuantities, cardinalities and ratiosArithmetic operationsCollection operations

To support ontology driven applications:ISO 3166 (country codes, mapped to language codes)ISO 639 (language codes)standard addresses (managed by the Universal Postal Union)ISO 4217 (currency codes, mapped to 3166)ISO 1087 (vocabulary for representing terminology)Various metadata standards such as ISO 5127, 11179 part 3, SKOS, Dublin Core

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Possible processes for determining repository content

Existing processes for adopting standards at OMG Request for Proposal (RFP) Request for Comment (RFC)

Alternative mechanisms Submit what you want Submit private contentShould these include automated assessment

and/or human evaluation components?

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RFP based Adoption Process Flow

Initial Submission Evaluation (by TF)and Revision

Responsesfrom Industry

Final Submission TF -> AB

Letters of IntentRequest for Proposal TF -> AB -> TC

Board Approval

TC Recommendation

Business Comm. Recommendation

Finalization andRevision

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OMG specific challenges

implementation requirementbicameral structure (domain and platform split)linking among models built from different metamodels and for different Communities of Practice (Business modelers versus Knowledge engineers)current organizational processes and staff not well suited to support continuing maintenance

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General challenges

Intellectual Property concerns particularly w.r.t. content based on International StandardsInsuring availability and persistencemaintenance and refreshment of content need long term resource commitment what processes can be used how will freshness be monitored

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Our approach

Draft and issue an RFP for a well scoped content component to test the system and discover issues and practicesDraft and issue an RFI to learn from others about the state of tooling, practices, and standards for repositories for knowledge models

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Date-Time Foundational Vocabulary RFP

http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?bmi/08-03-02Requests a consistent set of models for Date and Time concepts in the following forms: an SBVR business vocabulary an Ontology based on one or more of the logic

language metamodels in ODM (CL, OWL, RDFS) a UML class model

A submission team is already forming, but one needs to be (or partner with) an OMG member to participate

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Ontology and Vocabulary Management Information RFI

http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ontology/08-03-02Purpose: to guide the OMG on how to proceed in this areaAnyone who wishes may respondEmphasis on 3 issues in content management provenance – where the information comes

from effectivity – at what time, location, and/or use

is the content applicable or valid evolution – how we track change

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Ontology and Vocabulary Management Information RFI

Specific areas of knowledge requested: Application experience Tooling Tool interoperability Querying and accessibility Knowledge management and mapping Standards of practice Related or competing standards activities Example repositories

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Contacts

Evan K. Wallace -- co-Chair Ontology PSIG ewallace@nist.gov

Elisa Kendall -- co-Chair Ontology PSIG ekendall@sandsoft.com

Mark Linehan -- Chair Date-Time RFP submission team mlinehan@us.ibm.com