www.knoodl.com Collaborative Vocabulary Management Michael Lang SICoP February 5, 2008

The Vocabulary & The Knowledgebase A vocabulary is a machine readable, formal description of the meaning of “things” in a domain, to facilitate understanding and interoperability amongst systems, services, and participants. Seriously engineered artifact! No short-cuts! Must enable query, not just search! A knowledge base is a collection of facts that can be queried using any vocabulary. The unique aspect of a knowledge base is that the facts are independent of any schema providing for extensibility and continual change. Database = Facts + Schema Knowledgebase = Facts queried thru any Vocabulary

Community Vocabulary Engineering The meaning of “things” in a vocabulary must be established by a community The purpose of the vocabulary is to operate at the level of a community Community vocabularies facilitate Interoperability Integration Federation Cross-domain Analysis

Defining the Meaning of “things” OWL / RDF / SPARQL Extensible framework for adding any types of properties to “things” Ability to rigorously constrain properties Built-in properties for cross-vocabulary alignment Equivalence Sub-class Disjoint

Tagging vs. Mark-up Tagging enables search Mark-up enables query ISO 1179, Dublin Core, Taxonomies Search for tags yields thousands of results Lacks precision Mark-up enables query DAML + OIL OWL + RDF Query over an ontology produces targeted result sets Can be used at run-time

Engineering Collaboration 1990 – Unix HP UX, AT&T System 5, Berkely Unix, Solaris, IBM AIX 2000 – Linux Global collaboration creates most widely used server operating system ever Collaboration framework rudimentary at best Engineered artifacts can be created in a collaborative framework

Best Practices Start with a seed vocabulary before engaging the broader community A seed vocabulary includes a starter number of terms Linux started with a basic kernel Determine the level of complexity needed in your engineering to achieve your mission(s) Determine the process for incrementing change in the vocabulary Set-up a Governance model

Knoodl Road-map Improving ontology modeling capabilities Improving collaboration capabilities Enabling knowledge base development by incorporating: Scalable triple store Scalable reasoners Query/SPARQL wizard Instance editing capabilities SPARQL endpoint on the World Wide Web

Army Architecture Federation Pilot Demonstration Brooke Stevenson President & Semantic Architect Spry Enterprises, Inc. brookemstevenson@gmail.com 410-952-7917