| Number | 94 |
|---|---|
| Duration | 1 hour60 minute 3,600 second 0.0417 day |
| Date/Time | December 10 2021 19:00 GMT |
| 11:00am PST/2:00pm EST | |
| 7:00pm GMT/8:00pm CET | |
| Convener | Andrea Westerinen |
IAOA Semantic Web Applied Ontology (SWAO) SIG
THIS MEETING TOOK PLACE ON FRIDAY 10 DECEMBER 2021
Meetings have moved to the second Friday of the month at 2pm Eastern Time.
- We use Zoom for these meetings - details at Connection Details
Contents
Agenda
- Actions from last meeting
- KenB status update on the workshop communique from the IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA)
- RobertR liaison status with the IAOA Education Committee
- RobertR sharing "ontology definition" spreadsheet
- Review and discussion of "What Is an Ontology?" writeup
- Housekeeping and next meeting
- AoB
Proceedings
Actions Review
- (KenB) Another workshop for the IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA) will be held in June 2022
- A new draft of the communique will be available before that meeting (CLOSED pending a new release of the communique)
- (RobertR) Liaison with the IAOA Education Committee
- The Education Committee has not had a meeting since our November SWAO meeting
- RobertR will discuss the SWAO work at the next opportunity
- (RobertR) The Ontology Definition Spreadsheet is available on Google Drive (CLOSED)
- If used, attribution (listing Robert Rovetto) MUST be given
Ontology Definitions and Analysis
There was a good discussion of the definitions of ontology, graph and knowledge graph based on a preliminary document by AndreaW. This document was edited during the meeting to incorporate discussion points.
The main discussion was focused on the definition of ontology. The definition coming out of the meeting is:
"A partial, simplified description of the categories of things, attributes and relationships, in a topic area, created by a community of users for an explicit purpose, and specified in some formalism"
Other items of discussion:
- The goal of the ontology definition in the paper is to encompass all types of ontologies (foundational, computational, applied, ...)
- A hierarchy of definitions (as defined by RobertR and included below) could be created, but a general definition is needed
- Definitions from the Education Committee's term list were examined
- It was noted that Guarino's definition (#7) is old and has been revised
- Guarino's updated definition: "An ontology makes explicit people's distinctions and assumptions about the nature and structure of a portion of the world (the domain of discourse)"
- The definition in #6 is problematic since an ontology may start from a taxonomy, but this is not required
- A possible hierarchy of "ontologies" was proposed by RobertR with "sub-classes":
- Formal ontology
- "An ontology, consisting of categorical and non-categorical terms, explicitly expressed in an artificial language, such as FOL"
- The idea is formalizing the ontology. The conceptualization is expressed in some formalism, whether computable or not
- Computational ontology
- "A formal ontology expressed in a computable artificial language"
- The conceptualization is both expressed in a formalism and in a computational form, which may be the same
- Applied ontology - 2 senses:
- "A computational ontology that is intended or designed to be used for some particular application (broadly construed), domain of interest, database, or dataset"
- This sense moves from a computable ontology - that may not have a specific intended context or application in mind - to an application area
- "An ontology that is intended or designed to be used for some particular application (broadly construed), domain of interest, database, or dataset"
- This sense appeals to the phrasing of the name, and matches the intended meaning accordingly; an applied ontology may be any type of ontology (general or computational) but with an application in mind (if not executed)
- This specialization hierarchy will be discussed further at the January meeting, reviewing RobertR's presentation
Other Business
KenB noted an interesting article, "MIRO: guidelines for minimum information for the reporting of an ontology". This will also be discussed at January's meeting.
Next Meeting
The next SWAO SIG meeting will be January 14 2022, 2pm Eastern Time (Standard time, world-wide). We will continue discussing the definition of ontology.
Attendees
- Andrea Westerinen
- Mike Bennett
- Todd Schneider
- Ken Baclawski
- Robert Rovetto