Decision Mtg 16 Agenda

Decision Meeting #16 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 #15 (see minutes), three major topics were on the agenda. First up on the agenda was topic (1) Paper and Ontology Modeling Problems Submission Status. We have a position paper summarizing our incubator work appearing as a poster at the Workshop on Ontology Patterns (WOP) at ISWC 2010. The reviewers had valuable comments and we have now made the appropriate edits. At the meeting, we discussed the additional opportunity to contribute modeling problems which might be selected for work to be accomplished at the workshop. Three problems were proposed, one for ordering lists, another for modeling questions, and a third for modeling metrics. Eva mentioned that the paper will be presented as a poster and that the problems have been submitted and are just waiting to see if they will be selected for use at the workshop. The paper will eventually be available in the ceur-ws.org proceedings series. Marion will send Piotr a copy of the paper for his reference.

A second topic on the agenda was (2) Modeling "Criteria" Using the Situation Pattern. Piotr Nowara summarized his concepts and his submitted ontologies which can be viewed here. Eva mentioned having problems loading the ontologies. Piotr said he used Protege 4, so Eva will try that. Piotr's example is interesting. It contains 1 action, 5 criteria and 2 requirements. The action which is driving the decision-making is the need to perform a review/assessment of a software module. The first three criteria are to check by inspection, check by simulation and check by test. These three are ActionMethodologyCriterion while the next two are ActionSuccessCriteria, namely determining that the intended function did what it was supposed to do and didn't do anything it wasn't supposed to do. The requirements provide the underlying reference/justification for the criteria. So using the Situation pattern, Jeff noted that Piotr has been able to provide a criterion format that incorporates the significant context for what is driving and justifying the criteria. The situation pattern provides a realization of what otherwise would be an implied relationship between the criteria, the requirements and the action. The software module example is a good example of a boolean, yes/no, criteria. For some decisions, Jeff noted that it may be useful to expand and represent quantified values for the criteria and weights for automated assistance with non-boolean criteria, such as cost or quality. It is interesting to consider that if the criteria are highly defined, then the arbitrariness is removed and the "decision" format may begin to resemble a format for a "process". Good discussion ensued all around from this significant work performed and contributed by Peter.

Goal for this Meeting

At this sixteenth meeting of the Decision Incubator, we will have the pleasure of learning about the interesting security ontology work being performed by folks at 3 Sigma Research and its potential applicability for decision-making. We will be joined at the meeting by Michael Winburn, Jim Dike and Dr. Aaron Wheeler who will brief us on their activities. We will also take the opportunity to review with them our incubator activities and current status for potential future collaboration.

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) Introductions & Agenda Overview (5 min, Jeff)

We'll briefly consider the current status and agenda items for any suggested changes.

(1) Security Ontology Overview (30 min Michael Winburn)

We will learn from Michael and his team about their current capabilities and lessons learned modeling security aspects of problems with ontologies

(2) Security Implications for Decision-Making (15 min All)

We will take the opportunity to discuss the impact and implications of the security ontology work for decision-making.

(3) Latest Model Improvements & Updates(15 min Piotr/Eva/Jeff)

Let's take a few minutes for Piotr, Eva or others to discuss their current status on modeling decision-making components and/or status of related activities such as poster paper and any updates regarding the upcoming ontology workshop.