1 Thoughts on Hosting an Ontology and Vocabulary Repository at OMG Evan K. Wallace – co-Chair OMG Ontology PSIG Manufacturing Systems Integration Division NIST

2 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 available Implementations exist Member-controlled not-for-profit

3 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

4 A sampling of OMG specifications Common Object Request Broker Architecture - CORBA® Unified Modeling Language - UML TM Common Warehouse Metamodel – CWM TM Information Management Metamodel – IMM (in process) Meta-Object Facility - MOF TM XML Metadata Interchange – XMI TM Business Process Modeling Notation – BPMN Production Rule Representation - PRR Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Rules - SBVR Ontology Definition Metamodel – ODM

5 need for utility ontologies We 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 ( bin/doc?ptc/ ) ontology & vocabulary formats: ODM/XMI for RDF, OWL, CL, Topic Maps with native formshttp:// bin/doc?ptc/ Semantics for Business Vocabularies & Rules (SBVR) equivalents, Mappings to production rules standards, such that the same vocabulary can be reused for rule generation: PRR (Production Rules Representation), bin/doc?bmi/ http:// bin/doc?bmi/ slide provided by Sandpiper Software

6 reuse challenges vary Ontologies developed for programs such as the DARPA DAML program are aging Ontology pages have not been revised since 2004 (see Most recent submission was actually in 2003 (see 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

7 Potential OMG conceptual repository content For SBVR Foundational Vocabularies: Time and date Monetary amount Location Units of measure Quantities, cardinalities and ratios Arithmetic operations Collection 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, part 3, SKOS, Dublin Core

8 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 content Should these include automated assessment and/or human evaluation components?

9 RFP based Adoption Process Flow Initial Submission Evaluation (by TF) and Revision Responses from Industry Final Submission TF -> AB Letters of Intent Request for Proposal TF -> AB -> TC Board Approval TC Recommendation Business Comm. Recommendation Finalization and Revision

10 OMG specific challenges implementation requirement bicameral 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

11 General challenges Intellectual Property concerns particularly w.r.t. content based on International Standards Insuring availability and persistence maintenance and refreshment of content need long term resource commitment what processes can be used how will freshness be monitored

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

13 Date-Time Foundational Vocabulary RFP 02 Requests 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

14 Ontology and Vocabulary Management Information RFI bin/doc?ontology/ Purpose: to guide the OMG on how to proceed in this area Anyone who wishes may respond Emphasis 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

15 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

16 Contacts Evan K. Wallace -- co-Chair Ontology PSIG Elisa Kendall -- co-Chair Ontology PSIG Mark Linehan -- Chair Date-Time RFP submission team