Ontologies and XML December 2005

Unipart Conference Centre
Unipart House, Garsington Road, Cowley, Oxford OX4 2PG
T elephone: 01865 384083

Conference Co-chairs: Martin Bryan and Ann Wrightson, CSW Group Ltd

Ontologies need not be taxing – taxonomies are not taxed – terms always mean what you want them to mean – but always remember that the next person to read your message will apply his own interpretation to the words you so carefully crafted to convey what you thought.

Is this a problem or just an academic diversion? Just think about it. You’ve invested heavily in XML as a means of standardising the way you represent information that has a vital role to play in your business. You use XML to exchange that information with your business partners. But do they understand it the way you do? If not, your efforts at improving the efficiency of communication may fall far short of your expectations. You need standard ways of defining and relating the terms that you use in business communications to ensure that meaning is conveyed reliably and efficiently. This is an issue affecting all organisations and businesses for which information communication with business partners is in any way important. This is where ontologies come in.

If you are not sure what the difference is between an ontology, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, a term list or a classification scheme, or wonder if you might be missing out on the much-heralded development of a Semantic Web, XML UK plans to enlighten you at our next seminar on 8th December 2005.

Programme

Venue

Situated just a short drive from Oxford city centre yet convenient for the M40 and the Oxford ring road, the Unipart Conference Centre forms part of Unipart’s in-house university, known as the Unipart U, which has been providing lifelong learning and training facilities for employees for over ten years.

Unipart House can be reached easily by car, and is 10-15 minutes by taxi from Oxford railway station. More directions can be found on the Unipart Conference Centre website.

Registration

Student members of XML UK / EPSG: £45
XML UK / EPSG / W3C Members (first two registrations only for corporate members): £60
Additional registrations for XML UK / EPSG / W3C corporate members: £85
Non members: £110

To register please download the registration form, complete a printed copy and send to the address given on the form.

Exhibition

During the day there will be an exhibition area with table-top space available for suppliers of XML-based systems. If you would like to exhibit, please contact our exhibition organiser, Nigel Bray.

Exhibition space (members): £155
Exhibition space (non-members): £255

Presentations and Speakers

Ann Wrightson, CSW Group Ltd
A quick tour of this terminological minefield, or, a guided tour of selected destinations in philosophy, information science and IT.

Alex Brown, Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd
This presentation describes the result of a government-funded research project to create a commercial application for storing ontology-governed enterprise data, and its subsequent ‘real life’ roll-out. In many field of computing, as life, the 80:20 rule applies: you get 80% of the benefits for 20% of the effort. In the field of digital ontologies this ratio needs to be re-appraised … Something like 95:5 is nearer the mark. By selectively stealing the best ideas from emerging standards, and discarding the mostly unnecessary ivory-tower embellishments, it is possible to develop enterprise systems which are simple, flexible, and performant while also offering the kinds of data flexibility and richness promised by an ontological approach.

Alex Brown first became interested in structured markup when analysing literary texts for his doctorate (on early Shakespeare editions) in the late 1980s. Following this he worked as a developer on heavily object-oriented C++ application framework for cross-platform multimedia publishing, at the height of the CD-ROM boom. In 1997 Alex was one of the founding directors of Griffin Brown Digital Publishing Ltd, a UK-based company providing XML-based services and products. He is responsible for leading the company’s XML consulting and implementation, and his work includes advising clients on XML/IT strategy and practice, mentoring clients’ staff, writing DTDs and Schemas, and designing and developing XML software systems in C++, Java and other languages. In 2002, Alex was invited to join the British Standards Institute (BSI) Technical Committee IST/41, where he contributes to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 in its formation of the DSDL ISO standard, among other things.

Alex writes and speaks regularly on structured markup technologies and their application to information management.

Alistair Miles, CCLRC – Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Developing an OWL ontology requires time, effort and expertise, all of which adds up to cost. Furthermore, OWL encourages complexity that is often of little absolute value to enterprises trying to establish common meaning in their electronic business. SKOS Core (a W3C Working Draft) provides a framework for expressing taxonomy- or thesaurus-like information, which is simpler and therefore cheaper to produce and maintain. SKOS Core and OWL may be used in combination, and this hybrid approach gives an enterprise the ability to explore the relative costs and benefits of investing in ontology development at different levels of complexity. This presentation introduces a hybrid SKOS/OWL approach to ontology development, and its application to rich search and browse web information portals.

Definition, mapping and metadata tranformation with ontologies
Godfrey Rust, Rightscom Ltd
Abstract to follow.

DOCTOR (Document Classification Tool for Ontology-based Reuse)
Colin Bird & Kathryn McArtney, IBM UK Laboratories

During the Summer of 2005, IBM built a prototype document classification tool, DOCTOR, under the auspices of the Extreme Blue programme (http://www.ibm.com/employment/uk/students/ebi.html). We started with the basic premise that, to reuse a fragment of information, we must know that it exists and we must be able to find it. Classification metadata that conforms to a controlled vocabulary enables the discovery of reusable fragments, but we have to have the means to capture that metadata. DOCTOR demonstrated not only dynamic, user-supervised classification during the authoring process, but also automatic classification in a batch process. The DOCTOR interface also enabled manual selection of classification metadata using an ontology to control the vocabulary; and prompted authors with a dynamically-generated ranked set of related documents. The examples given in our paper will be taken from topics authored using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) specification from OASIS (http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html).

Colin Bird is an Information Architect in the User Technologies Department at IBM Hursley. Prior to that, Colin worked at the IBM UK Scientific Centre, developing image manipulation and visualization applications. This work led to several information retrieval projects, particularly involving content-based image retrieval, culminating in a year’s secondment to the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group at Southampton University. Colin currently holds a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship there. His time at Southampton engendered a strong interest in the capture of metadata for subsequent use in both the principled retrieval and the adaptive delivery of information.

Kathryn McArtney is an Information Developer and Terminologist in the User Technologies Department at IBM Hursley. Having joined IBM as a graduate in 2002, Kathryn writes for the CICS middleware product and leads the delivery of the Eclipse-based CICS information center. As an Extreme Blue mentor for the DOCTOR project, Kathryn guided the team in the use and application of DITA-XML.

Martin Bryan, CSW Research
W3C’s Web Ontology Language (whose acronym is spelt OWL rather than WOL) is becoming the recognized standard for the storage and interchange of complex sets of semantic information. This session will give attendees an overview of the functions provided within OWL, and show how each of these functions can be recorded as an extension to the XML-based Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Martin Bryan represents XML UK on BSI’s IST/41 panel that monitors the work of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. A regular contributor to Interchange and a member of ISUG, Martin has for many years promoted the use of structured document standards such as SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, XML and XSL throughout Europe.

Cancer grid: Combining OWL with ISO 11179 metadata
Steve Harris, Oxford University Computing Laboratory
CancerGrid is a consortium developing open standards for clinical cancer informatics based on data and metadata representation, distributed service-oriented architectures, and collaborative working in virtual organisations with exceptional confidentiality constraints. In this paper we outline the unique challenges that clinical trials and translational research pose to the e-Science community, and investigate how existing technologies can best be deployed to support research with a significant clinical component. We discuss the broader picture of national and international programmes for cancer research, and evaluate the usability of the current generation of software tools in support of these programmes.

Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopia AS
The Semantic Web has made ontologies a new IT buzzword, but there is more than one kind of ontology. Ontologies mean nothing in themselves, and must be interpreted, either in terms of logic or by a human. This talk argues that Topic Maps are better suited to communicate with human beings, by making the knowledge structures more understandable and navigable, in part through better grounding in information resources, while providing significant advantages in publishing and information retrieval.

Lars Marius Garshol is Development Manager at Ontopia, the leading Topic Maps software vendor. He has been active as a writer, speaker, open source developer, and technology developer for a number of years, within both XML and Topic Maps. He’s also editor of several Topic Maps-related ISO standards.

Kal Ahmed, NetworkedPlanet
Abstract to follow.