Decision Mtg 8 Agenda

Decision Meeting #8 Goal & Agenda

Background

The dial-in information for this week's meeting is here. The Decision Incubator Activity is intended to explore the use cases and design of a Decision Representation format (e.g. in XML, RDF, OWL…) available on the wiki along with its use by participants in testbed settings for experiments and exercises. Each meeting will be an opportunity to summarize progress & contributions to the wiki, review next steps and action items, and to review the current representation format.

Summary and Action Items from the Last Meeting

At the last meeting (see minutes),Jeff summarized the status of the activity as significant but with important weeks ahead to finish defining the decision components. Don mentioned that he is fleshing out the Situational Awareness use case. Eva reported that her investigations did not uncover any immediately available ontology patterns for application to the decision-making modeling efforts. There is an opportunity here to contribute to the pattern repository any new representations of patterns created. Eva also reported on reachout efforts to folks indicating an interest in decision-making. Regarding uses of semantic data, the participants noted that many of the semantic use cases are about showing data to the users on a map, in time or in space. Jeff reported on his initial explorations with open linked data for decision-making. The suggestion was that the properties of an open linked data set, such as the properties (owl:DatatypeProperties)that map to literals (integers, floats, strings,etc.) might be well-suited as potential metrics. One way to model this would be to have owl:DatatypeProperty inherit from a Metric class. The challenges with meta-modeling were briefly discussed and Jeff agreed to look into other alternative modeling approaches. Jeff also suggested that SPARQL might be well-suited as at least an initial assessment mechanism. All participants are looking to find more time for modeling efforts.

The core Action Items were to continue modeling on our chosen use cases and report on progress at the next meeting.

Goal for this Meeting

At this eigth meeting of the Decision Incubator, there are four main items on the agenda. First, we will hear from Piotr Nowara who has been invited to present an overview of his work on ontologies for decision-making. Second, we will review progress on modeling the use cases. Don will report on Situational Awareness, Eva on Open Linked Data, and Jeff will report progress on a slightly new use case addressing Metrics and Assessment. Finally, the members will discuss briefly best practices for how to handle certain basic issues such as collections, meta-modeling, and reification.

Agenda

The following agenda items will be discussed at the next meeting. The topic, time, summary and discussion leader are provided for each agenda item.

(1) Review of Status, Goals & Agenda Overview (5 min, Jeff)

Use of our component models will be mentioned and suggested goals for next few weeks.

(2) Overview of Piotr Nowara Ontologies (20 min, Piotr Nowara)

Piotr Nowara will provide an overview of his work on ontologies for decision-making and the participants will discuss opportunities for collaboration.

(3) Use Case Modeling Status & Progress (15 minutes, Don, Eva, Jeff)

Don, Eva and Jeff will each report on the current status and progress of modeling efforts for their respective use cases. Jeff will report on recent Metrics for Assessment Use Case progress. Eva will bring up some general issues with representing a decision, e.g. what is actually a decision and is it different from the selected option?

(4)Best Practices for Basic Ontology Modeling Issues (15 minutes)

To guide the modeling efforts, the participants will briefly discuss what they know about best practices for handing basic modeling issues, such as how to aggregate multiple items (collections), what are the options of overlaying a higher-level class structure on the existing owl classes (meta-modeling), and how best to handle referencing rdf statements (reification).

• Collections are for instance discussed in the Collection Content ODP, however, maybe this is not what we need? What is the use case?
• We need to take a closer look at the OWL 2 metamodelling capabilities if we need this.
• There are built-in capabilities for reification in RDF but in many cases it may be more intuitive and practical to instead model some n-ary relations to represent similar things with OWL.