Discussion of Discovery Use Case:
Peter Vojtas is asking whether "machine processable" means it is already annotated wrt an ontology.
Ken: By machine processable, I'm assuming some form tagging (likely XML) that does not require processing free text, i.e. what comprises properties and associated values would be readily identifiable. One or more ontologies providing semantics for the property set and the associated values would enhance the reasoning possible but my original thinking did not require this.
===from Peter Vojtas === Three use cases, Discovery, User preference modelling and Soft shopping agent have a lot in common, maybe we can discuss them together?
- ===end Peter Vojtas ===
Comments from Mike Pool: I think that this case would be more compelling if we broadened the context slightly or further explained the nature of the catalogue. If the user is interacting more or less directly with a single catalogue, the "property mismatch" problem seems less troublesome as it's likely that the selection criteria are available and that various items would be catalogued via the same criteria. However, it is a fairly common situation for web services to shop over a variety of sources, then the kinds of problems that are described here are more likely to play a role. (but perhaps the catalogue is made up of the goods from the various producers so this really is the problem being described. [KL: see additions to item 1 under Required resources.]
We may also want to explain why the best solution here is not to introduce a standard vocabulary for products and services, i.e., why isn't this just the kind of problem that OWL should be solving (without standard vocabs. I think the solution would be very difficult to obtain) [KL: standards vocabularies are notorious for being ambiguous and misused in catalogs. Some semantic negotiation service may eventually be developed but that will have uncertainty in its conversions.]
I think that the compelling case for standardization here is in terms of giving some clarity into the reasoning process. I think it would be useful to mention this in each of the use cases. [KL: I think this would be a summary section in the use case template but it's a little late to add it now.]