The first stage of GAO development process: “bag-of-concepts”

Dear All,

Please find some important remarks and a technical guidance about the initial phase of works on GAO. Feel free to comment on that matters – our goal is to create the process that is not too complicated and assumes use of simple tools (at least in the beginning)

1. Some ontological remarks

We start building GAO from collecting the concepts recognised as relevant within the automotive domain.

The concepts will be collected in a conceptual map called „bag-of-concepts”. Adding the new concepts to the conceptual map, we can take advantage of the auto.schema.org or go beyond the set of concepts we have there. The first set of concepts is stored in GAO.mm file.

By the collaborative development we shall create the conceptualisation of the automotive domain shared by all the participants of Automotive Ontology Community Group.

At this stage of GAO development process we shall not impose any semantical structure on the bag-of-concepts. The concepts are to be loosely linked by one relation which covers all the SKOS-like hierarchical and associative relations such as “broader”, “narrower” and “(somehow) related”.

Of course, in the end, GAO is intended to be a formal specification (RDF(S) or OWL) of the conceptualisation of the automotive domain (shared by all the participants of Automotive Ontology Community Group). So just after the community decides the work on the conceptual map of the domain was completed, we shall transform the bag-of-concepts into the first version of GAO

2. A brief technical guidance

At this stage to contribute to GAO it is enough to have the most up-to-date conceptual map of GAO concepts represented by the mind mapping diagram (see GAO.mm file). The GAO.mm file can be easily modified by FreeMind tool (available here: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download).

GAO.mm file is located in GitHub GAO-GAO repository (see: https://github.com/W3C-GAO/gao-gao). The path is:

bag-of-concepts mindmap –> freemind files –> GAO.mm

It is recommended to use a GitHub software (win: https://windows.github.com or mac: https://mac.github.com) to access and modify GAO-GAO repository. You can use standard

• “pull” to grab any changes from the GAO-GAO repository and to merge them into your local repository
• “push” to send your contribution from your local repository to GAO-GAO one.

If you prefer you can also open/submit an issue suggesting some changes or send your GAO.mm files by e-mail directly to robert.trypuz@makolab.net.

Further steps of GAO development process will be discussed during the next teleconference (see GAO Community Charter: https://www.w3.org/wiki/GAO_Community_Charter).