The Ontolog Community: Differentiation & Potential Contribution

1. ppy/Yim_Ontolog_20051110.ppt/Nov-2005 Ontology Community Efforts: Differentiation & Synergy The Ontolog Community: Differentiation & Potential Contribution by Peter P. Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com> ONTOLOG, co-convener / CIM3, CEOpresented at the: Joint SICoP-Ontolog Panel Discussion: November 10, 2005 ( v 1.02)

2. ppy/Yim_Ontolog_20051110.ppt/Nov-2005 Introducing: • 3 co-conveners - PeterYim; LeoObrst & KurtConrad • Hosted on the CIM3 collaborative work environment infrastructure • Charter- Ontolog is an open, international, virtual community of practice, whose membership will: • Discuss practical issues and strategies associated with the development and application of both formal and informal ontologies. • Identify ontological engineering approaches that might be applied to the UBL effort, as well as to the broader domain of eBusiness standardization efforts. • Strive to advance the field of ontological engineering and semantic technologies, and to help move them into main stream applications. • Activities: • Weekly conference calls of active members • Monthly virtual Invited Speaker events • Scheduled Technical Discussions • Specific Projects: like [CCT-Rep], [Health-Ont], NHIN-RFI response, ... • Resides on a virtual collaborative work environment which serves as a dynamic knowledge repository to the community's collective intelligence • We welcome your participation – see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ ONTOLOG (aka. Ontolog Forum) est. Apr.2002

3. Working as Communities of Practice What are CoP’s anyway? small groups of people who have worked together over a period of time. Not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorized or identified group. They are peers in the execution of "real work." What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows. (--John Seely Brown / ref: ttp://ps1.cim3.net/ps.php?theurl=http://www.fastcompany.com/online/01/people.html#purp205) a group of professionals, informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge.(--Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz / ref: ttp://ps1.cim3.net/ps.php?theurl=http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/definitions.shtml#purp47) groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better.(--Etienne Wenger / ref: ttp://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm) in our case here, it could be groups that work together along lines of business within the government that are dedicated to the support of certain business functions(ref: ttp://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DataReferenceModel_09_2004/TheGlossary_DRM_VolIv1#nid2K8F)

4. Ontolog – an open CoP “ John McCarthy chating with Doug Engelbart at a bar … leading to a joint virtual project team-up”

5. Ontolog’s key Differentiation Activities are community driven; we are neutral, open, and we are not answerable to any authority or institutional structure, except for (explicitly) our charter & IPR policy, and (implicitly) our professional integrity. We are adamant about collaboration, sharing and open knowledge… and are trying to spur organic or emergent behaviorin the community and our project teams

6. What really matter are …(… after one can meet with what is needed) COST There’s practically no out-of-pocket cost to participate QUALITY We have been blessed with a membership that include some of the most respected names in the space … and we have nothing else to answer to except our professional integrity Over the last 3.5 years, we’ve earned the trust and respect of fellow practitioners RESPONSIVENESS (or AGILITY) Given a passionate active membership, we can ‘really’ turn on a dime Back in my CIM days, I’ve learned that …

7. What can Ontolog bring to the table? • our open collaborative attitude - we can and will gladly work with other communities sharing similar attitudes and goals • our established infrastructure and community membership of a lot of the key players in the domain • our agility: we can put together a fairly substantial virtual event in short order (say, 2 weeks.) • help evangelize ontological work and educate the industry • explicit input to eGov and Standards bodies (OASIS, UN/CEFACT, …) • implicit sharing of expertise with other communities (especially those who reside on and share the cim3.net infrastructure)

8. Case Examples of Communities on the CIM3.NET Collaborative Work Environments (CWE’s) Ontolog CWE-dev Bootstrap Protégé eGov: COLAB eGov: DRM project work & public forum Millennium Project(AC/UNU) Digital Art Ontology Hosting of: SUMO, CODS, … (more)

9. Q & A Discussion

10. Backup slides Appendix ppy/Yim_Ontolog_20051110.ppt/Nov-2005

11. US – eGovernment

12. ppy/Yim_Ontolog_20051110.ppt/Nov-2005 • ... more than just smart and knowledgeable individuals: • We need to get organized (even when that ‘organization’ is supposed to be organic) • we need to work as distributed nodes in a networked community, and get coordinated • we need to arrive at shared understanding • we need proper coordination and governance • ... more than research, experiments and pilots • ... we need adoption: • we need to apply ontological engineering and semantic technologies to real problems • we need to operationalize these applications and deploy them on secured, robust, scalable infrastructures • we need to transfer the technology and our learnings to the world at-large • ... please refer also to: • Yim, P. “Developing Semantic Technologies in a Collaborative Work Environment” • presentation at: http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ExpeditionWorkshop/SemanticConflictMappingandEnablement_MakingCommitmentsTogether_2005_02_22#nid2IGF What Does it Take to do it Effectively?

13. Working in the “wicked problem” space “ … on tackling 'wicked problems': it's about arriving at a shared commitment, with a shared understanding, augmented by a shared display and a facilitator.” -- citing the work by the IBIS people (Horst Rittle/Jeff Conklin) “wicked” problems are problems that we can’t even properly define … Ref: ttp://www.oppendieckcom/wicked.tm

14. ppy/Yim_Ontolog_20051110.ppt/Nov-2005 introducing: The Fishnet Organization these are temporary (or semi-permanent) hierarchies, that emerge out of the CoP's, which capitalize on distributed capabilities to achieve specific purposes; when those purposes are achieved (or when the opportunities no longer exist), they disband, and the resources (people, knowledge, skill sets) are returned to the CoP's where they come from. An Organizational Form that the CWE aims at Supporting – leading us toward Open Virtual Enterprises Source: Institute for the Future: Johansen, R., Swigart, R.Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization

15. Harnessing explosive technology depends, to a new degree, on the “Capability-Improvement Capability” CapabilityInfrastructure Tool System Human System Media Portray Travel, View Study Manipulate Retrieve Compute Communicate Paradigms Organization Procedures Customs Methods Language Attitudes Skills Knowledge Capability to Improve Needs a prominentand explicit role! Training - Doug Engelbart, Jan. 2000 (excerpt from the tanford ‘Unfinished Revolution-II’ Colloquium) Percept. Motor Mental

16. Software Featured in CODS Protégé Multiuser Server RDBMS backend (Oracle or MySQL) PomptTAB (Protégé plugin) Subversion server & client (TortoiseSVN client for Windows) Apache web server & WebDAV server Linux platform Augmentation of the team collaboration with the CWE suite of open source collaboration tools (for portal, archived discussion, wiki & file-sharing workspace)

17. An Augmented Approach • We combine the strengths of both the Protégé ontology tools platform, and CIM3’s infrastructure to provide a collaborative ontology development environment for both humans and machines, optimizing between (sometimes conflicting) objectives like: • Human expressiveness vs. machine rigor • Average user vs. power user expectation • Secured system vs. open system • Transaction system vs. groupware system behavior • Our intent is to foster shared understanding and learning • We are trying to spur innovation, as well as organic or emergent behavior in the user communities and teams

18. ppy/Yim_Ontolog_20051110.ppt/Nov-2005 Introducing: • Mission: to enable more effective distributed collaboration and virtual enterprise through bootstrapping collective intelligence over the Internet • Products/Services: providing an ISP/ASP based Collaborative Work Environment (“CWE”) infrastructure that enables distributed project teams, virtual enterprise partners and communities of practice to work effectively over the Internet. • CIM3 - Collaboration In huMan, Methods and Machine, in essence, we are about: • People, Process & Tools • Augmented Collaboration • Approach-1: People as an integral part of the system • Approach-2: We optimize our infrastructure, tools and process for CoP’s and Distributed Project Teams … we take care of the infrastructure, so that those communities and teams can really focus on their work • Approach-3: We do it because we feel it is important, meaningful, and that we are passionate about it (but then, we still appreciate getting remunerated for the work.) CIM Engineering Inc. (dba. CIM3) est. 1989

19. Hosted Infrastructure Product features: CWE – “open”, “community-only” & “secured” Robust, scalable, enterprise performance Secured and Fault Tolerant Platform neutral (PC’s, Mac’s, Linux, Unix, …) Infrastructure: Tier-1 hosting facility 100Mbps bandwidth into the Internet backbone Backbone: multiple OC48 & Gige self-healing fiber-ring

20. Our Hosting Facility

21. “Open” – the final frontier we mean: open standards, open technology (including free and open source software), open content, open knowledge, open process, open access, open mind … and the transparency associated with them it’s a two-edged sword that we need to learn to handle however, our unimpeded progress (as in continuous improvement to cope with an exponential rate of change) will depend on it

22. The real “Key” to success the individual participants hold the key to the communities’ and their project’s success, and it’s all in their “attitude towards sharing and commitment”