1 On the Inaugural Event of NCOR I bring our congratulations and best wishes to NCOR and its leadership, on behalf of my CIM3 colleagues, and members of the Ontolog community I will introduce some of the work we’ve been bringing to the table... and take the opportunity to pledge my support to the NCOR endeavor In particular, I take pleasure in announcing the launch of the joint CIM3-SMI Collaborative Ontology Development Infrastructure and Service (CODS)

2 Use-Inspired Basic Research ● Ontological Research is 'strategic' research that is more appropriately modeled in Donald Stokes' Pasteur's Quadrant (as use-inspired basic research)... we should no longer treat (and fund) basic-research and applications like opposite poles ● With the Internet, virtual communities, and an 'open' paradigm, we have the promises of unprecedented research capabilities in our hands now. ttp:// A couple of personal insight I'd like to share:

3 ONTOLOG (aka. Ontolog Forum) est. Apr co-conveners - PeterYim; LeoObrst & KurtConrad Hosted on the CIM3 collaborative work environment infrastructure Charter - Ontolog is an open, international, virtual community of practice, whose membership will:  Discuss practical issues and strategies associated with the development and application of both formal and informal ontologies.  Identify ontological engineering approaches that might be applied to the UBL effort, as well as to the broader domain of eBusiness standardization efforts.  Strive to advance the field of ontological engineering and semantic technologies, and to help move them into main stream applications. Activities:  Weekly conference calls of active members  Monthly virtual Invited Speaker events  Scheduled Technical Discussions  Specific Projects: like [CCT-Rep], [Health-Ont], NHIN-RFI response,...  Resides on a virtual collaborative work environment which serves as a dynamic knowledge repository to the community's collective intelligence We welcome your participation – see: introducing:

4 Introducing to the CODS Team Stanford Medical Informatics- developer of Protégé  An open-source ontology tool platform  Comprehensive OWL / RDF / Reasoning support  Active community with thousands of users (33,000+ registrations)  Has been used to edit ontologies with tens of thousands of concepts CIM3 – the ISP for CWEs (Collaborative Work Environments)  Mission: to enable more effective distributed collaboration and virtual enterprise through bootstrapping collective intelligence over the Internet  Products/Services: providing a robust CWE infrastructure that enables high performance distributed project teams, virtual enterprise partners and communities of practice to work  Host to the Ontolog-Forum – an internal CoP focusing on the practical issues of both formal and informal ontologies, and their adoption into mainstream application through standardization

5 The CODS Team Up SMI & CIM3 – to develop and host an open Collaborative Ontology Development Service (CODS) and Ontology Repository for all the initial CODS team members:  Mark Musen, Ray Fergerson, Natasha Noy, Jonathan Cheyer and Peter Yim; with the support of their colleagues at Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI) and CIM Engineering, Inc. (CIM3)

6 Protégé – Ontology & Knowledgebase Editor

7 Software Featured in CODS Protégé Multiuser Server RDBMS backend (Oracle or MySQL) PomptTAB (Protégé plugin) Subversion server & client (TortoiseSVN client for Windows) Apache web server & WebDAV server Linux platform Augmentation of the team collaboration with the CWE suite of open source collaboration tools (for portal, archived discussion, wiki & file-sharing workspace)

8 Hosted Infrastructure Product features:  CWE – “open”, “community-only” & “secured”  Robust, scalable, enterprise performance  Secured and Fault Tolerant  Platform neutral ( PC’s, Mac’s, Linux, Unix, …) Infrastructure:  Tier-1 data center facility  100Mbps bandwidth into the Internet backbone  Backbone: multiple OC48 & Gige self-healing fiber-ring

9 Our Hosting Facility

10 An Augmented Approach We combine the strengths of both the Protégé ontology tools platform, and CIM3’s infrastructure to provide a collaborative ontology development environment for both humans and machines, optimizing between (sometimes conflicting) objectives like: Human expressiveness vs. machine rigor Average user vs. power user expectation Secured system vs. open system Transaction system vs. groupware system behavior Our intent is to foster shared understanding and learning We are trying to spur innovation, as well as organic or emergent behavior in the user communities and teams

11 Use case Scenarios Small/medium size ontology development project  user/team registers project with CODS-Admin and uploads seed ontology  CODS-Admin opens collaborative project on Protégé multiuser server  user/team collaboratively develops ontology and commits it to the subversion repository  Publishes /releases ontology (via CODS-Admin) Large scale ontology project (similar to above, but…)  dedicated review/accept process (through a lead editor)  probably also a full-time project manager or project administrator who will also be responsible for version and release control

12 What Next? Pilot projects welcomed Further refinement of process Funding solicited to support the development of both the open source tools and the infrastructure Skills & expertise in software engineering welcome Skills & expertise in ontological engineering welcome Formation and participation of a community to carry this project forward Please Peter Yim or Mark Musen