Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Generative Methodology Glass Bead Games
n-articulated ontological framework
On using RDF to model web services
Link back to part of the “solution” to translations between
RDF / OWL and Models of Information -> [167]
Sub-theme
using RDF to model web
services
Communication to the Protégé forum from Rebecca
Questions from [168]
>>Question: but is UML a
Descriptive Logic ontology?
Nope - just a convenient
way to do the information modeling, transform it into ISO compliant structured
metadata, link it to an ontology. Like I said - I think we are going to be reasoning
in the ontology and applying it back to the other representations, because
there are going to be limitations in trying to reason within the other
formalisms.
>>Question 1: what is the DL based ontology that (you mentioned)
is now used to link, (semantically link?) the ISO/IEC 11179 standard to? Is this not
Protege Frames? Is it UML equipped with logic? I am unclear about what you are talking about.
It is NCI Thesaurus. http://nciterms.nci.nih.gov/NCIBrowser/Dictionary.do I think it now an OBO terminology.
>>Question 2: When one is
talking about 11179 compliance, what does this mean precisely (to you)?
http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2489/Ittf_Home/PubliclyAvailableStandards.htm
lists the many ISO standards.
To me it means you have to describe your data using the ISO/IEC metamodel for metadata registry.
So you have to have Data Element Concepts and they have to have Object Classes and Properties, etc. etc. Much of this is in Part 3. Some other stuff is scattered throughout the other parts. Since I am most definitely not in the business of developing metadata registries, you'd probably get a better answer from somebody who has implemented this standard. I think each of the ISO 11179 registries that I have seen has it's own implementation of the standard. Each one has a slightly different flavor. NCI posts their metamodel on the caDSR site
>>You mention an almost complete paper
describing "semantic linkage".
And by "semantic linkage" you mean precisely a mapping from
the 11179 to a DL based logic (say Protege Frames (CLIPS) or OWL).
As you might know, I (and others) would express some concern about the use of that language, as the real task is structural interoperability between finite state machines. Right?
I think 'semantic linkage' is the perfect phrase personally.
Not sure why that is concerning. It seems to capture exactly what we are doing.
As to the 'real task' - I think there are many 'real tasks'. If I understand how you are using the term 'structural interoperability' - caBIG would definitely not consider itself limited to structural interoperability as they are attempting both semantic and syntactic interoperability.
The methodology being developed has a healthy dose of human intervention - interoperability reviews, annotation reviews by terminologists, etc. Thank goodness.
I can completely believe that there are going to be methods of combining ontologies and information models that will provide more valid inferences across the model than what we are doing in caBIG. But as I mentioned, I think there are definitely tradeoffs here that few of us may truly appreciate until we have created some models, and used them to exchange data and make some inferences. At the very least, one of the wonderful things about the caBIG project is that we are putting it all to work right away with something like 30-40 applications in three scientific domain workspaces on their way towards integrating through caGrid. That's a good way to find out quickly where things fail.
Glad to see that many different groups are attempting this in different ways. As we all report on what we were able to wring out of these approaches, we should have more data to help us evaluate which paths are worth pursuing for which tasks.
best,
Rebecca