Minutes for 05 September 2007 URW3 Meeting

Attendees:

Agenda:

  1. Approve minutes from previous two meetings. Note, the minutes are linked from http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/#Minutes.
  2. Review status of action items from previous meeting
  3. Report from editing committee for final report. Draft report at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/wiki/DraftFinalReport.
  4. Review work plan and prepare to move to next phase of work plan. Reference: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/wiki/URW3WorkPlan.
  5. Discussion of cross-cutting issues from use cases.
  6. Other business

Scribe: Thomas Lukasiewicz

Discussion summary:

  1. Minutes from previous two meetings were *not* approved due to insufficient quorum.

  2. Review status of action items from previous meeting

    Action 1: Ken to check how to embed figures into Wiki page.
    Status: Done: There are two scripts that allow embedding; they look promising.

    Action 2: Kathy to make a Wiki list of those attending ISWC workshop.
    Status: Done. List at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/wiki/People_from_URW3_who_are_going_to_URSW_2007_in_Boursin.

    Action 3:Kathy will send an email asking people who will attend URSW to put their names on a Wiki.
    Status: Done.

    Action 4: Paulo, Trevor and Mitch will communicate among themselves to do the organization of the editing team. For the next meeting, they need to report the editing team strategy.
    Status: Done; see also below.

    Action 5: Ken will send an email asking who else volunteers to the editing team while also announcing the current volunteers.
    Status: Done.

    Action 6: Giorgos will summarize RIF work relevant to us at a future telecon.
    Status: This is deferred till next meeting, because Giorgos couldn't make today's meeting.

    Action 7: Everyone add to Wiki discussion of sentence.
    Status: The discussion has not been very active on Wiki. To avoid just playing with words, we will focus on drafting text for final report.

  3. Report from editing committee for final report. Draft report at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/wiki/DraftFinalReport.
    1. Editing committee is Paulo, Trevor, and Mitch.
    2. Mitch has sent us an Excel file with an editing plan.
    3. Editing team will coordinate a coherent writeup of use cases. Each use case manager will write about the use case. We need to develop a template for writing up use cases so they are all in a consistent format.
    4. Mitch suggests that since we have an ontology, we should review use cases for how well they cover the ontology.
    5. Ken says he tried to relate the Discovery use case back to the then-current ontology. He doesn't remember how well we captured this in the discussion. Ken said he would work with the Discovery use case (http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/wiki/Discovery) and work with the editing team to write it up in a good form. Ken and Kathy and the editing team will confer offline in email about how to write up the discovery use case.
    6. Peter has a principal problem: we describe the status of web after our suggestions are used or about a web as of today? Ken says part of our conclusions may be that a level of standardization will be required. But the web will continue to be a diverse community. Kathy says the use cases describe problems and a vision for their solution. Kathy says this will help us to identify things that need to be represented and therefore imply what needs to be standardized. Ken reminds us that we won't write standards, but will lay out things we think need to be standardized. 
    7. Peter and others say that the process of RDFa annotation is a main uncertainty problem. If you have uncertain information, you can't put it on the web in RDFa without some attention to semantics and some way of representing or resolving the uncertainty. Peter will help editing committee on this point.
    8. Peter asks: If you have uncertain information, is this problem related to machine understanding web data? Ken says need to point to kinds of information you need and standard encoding that could represent it. Example: SAWSDL does something trivial but critical -- gives you a way of pointing to semantic model that defines term. Link could be just text, but could be updated in future to OWL ontology. The idea: problem is understanding, first step is a standard that gives a pointer to semantic models. This is a good template for us. We aren't going to write a standard. We can identify things that are needed in tags. And where it is needed. This gives us a way of thinking about problems that can be solved. What do we need to capture and where -- we can turn those conclusions over to somebody who can write the syntax. Ken says the level of semantics we would specify is to say there needs to be an annotation that points to a semantic model.
    9. Peter says that there is a difference between whether something is annotated by the author or by somebody else afterwards. Can be done manually or automatically. Matthias says that this might be the issue of provenance annotation: annotate not just with a number but with additional information such as author or other relevant information. Ken says he is working on formal descriptions of services. Ken says they are talking about 3rd party annotations. Peter might create a service and annotate it with what he considers best practices on using it. Then, Ken might read Peter's best practices, and then certify it for his purposes. Then, Mitch might look at Ken's certification, and it might be sufficient for Mitch because he trusts Ken's certification process. Peter says that Mitch can observe his agent has low precision - author's annotation is not sufficient. We need 3rd party annotations. Mitch says this is a kind of indirect reference or reification.

  4. Review work plan and prepare to move to next phase of work plan. Reference: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/wiki/URW3WorkPlan.
    1. Kathy says we are reasonably on target. Ken says we still have a few weeks left where we can be discussing use cases. Also, it took a while to get XG members signed up as Invited Experts and he believes W3C would allow XG to slightly run over charter period if we were finishing the XG report.
    2. Vipul asks what is a methodology? Vipul would call fuzzy logic, probability, etc. a technology. He would say a methodology is a way to match technologies to problems. A problem with semantic web technology is how to make them useful to the masses.
    3. Ken says that if I'm making a doctor's appointment, I should be able to say, "I am usually free on Wednesdays but usually Tuesdays are booked up." And it should understand what that means.
    4. Anne suggests to annotate data with the appropriate properties indicating which techniques might be applied:Adapting existing systems (with their uncertainty technologies) for use on the web. Maybe a wrapper would be needed to convert between different uncertainty technologies. For example, the wrapper might say - random variable, normal distribution - and then you know what kind of statistics can be applied.
    5. Kathy gives a link to the presentation on combining formalisms: http://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/QMDNS2007/WebPages/PRES/TCS1-1-Wright.pdf. Kathy also mentions a paper by David Heckerman on the relationship between certainty factors and probabilities from the 80's or early 90's.

  5. Discussion of cross-cutting issues from use cases.
    1. Anne mentions the POWDER Semantic Web Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/.
    2. Anne mentions the Service Modeling Language (SML): http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-sml-20070806/.
    3. Vipul mentions the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG): http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/.
    4. Anne mentions the Semantic Web Coordination Group: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/CG/.

  6. Other business.
    1. Next four sessions are September 19 and October 3, 17, 31. (We will have telecons every two weeks at this time.) Anne points out that November 14 is ISWC.

Action items

  1. ACTION (1): Editing team to go over IRC log and capture essential topics to include in our report.
  2. ACTION (2): Vipul to relate health care use cases to HCLSIG activities.
  3. ACTION (3): Ken and Kathy to join SW Coordination Group call on 14 September and will check on relevance of POWDER, SML, possibly others to URW3 work.
  4. ACTION (4): Vipul to relate HCLSIG use cases to uncertainty ontology.
  5. ACTION (5): Vipul will give us a report at a future telecon.