Decision Mtg 14 Agenda

Decision Meeting #14 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 from the Last Meeting

At the last meeting (see minutes), three major topics were on the agenda. First up was (1), Update and Insights on "Core Decision" Model for Decisions. Eva began by describing some of the current modeling issues, including those which Piotr identified, and which are documented here. Eva modified the decision model to use the "description" pattern instead of the "realization" pattern. The question is whether this still may be unnecessarily abstract since this pattern usually appears in the context of a "situation". Doing some actual modeling of decisions will help to determine this. Another issue was the appropriate modeling pattern for "criteria" which connects values with options. Piotr was thinking in terms of concrete situations when we are applying these values as opposed to criteria being an abstract subclass of "concept". In this case, when we think of criteria as a "situation", we're thinking more in terms of how the criteria are applied as opposed to the criteria themselves. Most of the meeting involved interesting discussions on these topics of which patterns apply from which perspective. Due to some technical difficulties, the meeting ended a little early, but Jeff summarized briefly re agenda item (3), Pattern Implementation Schedule and Future Papers, that one way to get a handle on the workload is to list out the patterns we need to implement, as those are determined, and begin to assign them to folks for reuse and specialization. We have the beginning list of patterns on our wiki at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/decision/wiki/Final_Report_Decision_Components_And_Patterns. On this wiki page, we mention the patterns which are implied by the basic components of the decision, such as (1) Question (Statement with Variable pattern); (2) Options (Filter and Aggregation/List patterns);(3) Criteria and As (Normalizer, Weighting, Aggregation/List patterns); (4) Assessment (OrderedList pattern) which is the application of the Criteria to the Options; and (5) Choosing the Answer (Selection pattern)

Goal for this Meeting

At this fourteenth meeting of the Decision Incubator, we will take the opportunity to visit about the most appropriate revisions to the position paper which has been accepted for the WOP@ISWC 2010. We will also discuss briefly some thoughts on the Question (Statement with Variable) pattern and Quads (Referencing Statements Pattern) and any issues regarding using rdf:Sequence for Options (ordered lists pattern). Finally, Jeff will briefly summarize the current status of a web-based tool to support the application of the decision process using linked open data.

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.

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

Our paper status, and our modeling issues are both interesting and challenging and are appropriate for our mid-incubator status.

(1) Paper Status and Remaining Fixes (15 min Eva/Marion/Jeff)

Eva's wonderful work on editing our position paper, summarizing our current incubator status, will be recognized and discussion will center on any additional changes needed to address reviewer's comments.

(2) Modeling a Question as a Statement with Variable, Referencing using Quads, and rdf:Sequence for Options (15 min Jeff)

Jeff will lead some discussion on the modeling of a Question. Jeff will present ideas on the importance of and methods for representing a Question as more than a string, but as a machine-understandable statement with a variable which can then be referenced directly as a quad.

(3) Update and Insights on "Core Decision" Model Issues for Decisions (15 min, Eva/Piotr)

Piotr and Eva will update us on any recent discussions or insights on modeling issues.

(4) Status of Web-based Tool for Decisions with Linked Open Data (10 min, Jeff)

Jeff will give a quick description of the web-based tool for supporting decisions with linked open data.