[seek-kr-sms] SEEK successes in ontology research

[Joseph Goguen]

Dear Colleagues,

I am just back from an "ontology tour of Germany," in which i visited Bremen,
Schloss Dagstuhl (the German computer science meeting center) and Leipzig, in
each case presenting some work done for SEEK, which seems to have aroused a
good deal of interest.  Mainly, I presented work in the paper "Data, Schema,
and Ontology Integration," available at

   http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/lisbon04.pdf

which was first presented at CombLog04 in Lisbon in August.  It introduces
what i called the "integration stack," consisting of data, schema, ontology,
and ontology language, each of which requires translation for some cases of
integration; it also summarizes work on our SCIA matching tool, and on the
mathematical machinery behind the integration stack and the tool, including
a general theory of matching schemas of different kinds (spreadsheets,
relational, XML, ...) and ontologies of different kinds (OWL, RDF, KIF, ...).

The result of the visit to Bremen is that I will be invited to spend a month
there next summer, helping with their project to integrate ontologies over
multiple logics to support navigation for a voice activated wheelchair.  The
result at Dagstuhl is that one of the official recommendations from the
workshop on "Semantic Interoperability and Integration" will be to study
foundations of information integration using the theory of institutions which
I developed (with Burstall) to formalize the notions of logic, theory over a
logic, and translations of theories and logics.

A description of the institutional approach to ontology integration is given
in the paper "Information Integration in Institutions," available at

   http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/papers/IF.html

This paper shows how the information flow and channel algebra of Barwise and
Seligman and the Formal Concept Analysis of Ganter and Wille can be done over
any logical system, in a much more general way, and it also shows how many
proposed notions of information integration are special cases of the category
theoretic notion of co-relation, and gives some theorems about co-relations
and integration.

It was discussed quite a lot at Dagstuhl, and the IEEE Standard Upper
Ontology project has also decided to adopt this approach as a basis for
future work; see

  http://suo.ieee.org/IFF/metalevel/lower/metatheory/environment/version20041010.html

At Leipzig, Prof Rahm and i discussed database integration, using schemas and
ontologies at some length, and he decided to adopt some ideas from our SCIA
tool for the next generation of his COMA schema matching tool (called
COMA++), especially our idea of critical points.  (Rahm is one of the leaders
in tool building for database schema integration.)

Another outcome of this trip is that I will (subject to approvals by some
other committee members) be invited to be keynote speaker at the next ICCA
(Int Conference on Concept Analysis, which focuses on work of both John Sowa
and Ganter & Wille).

I should also mention that in November, I will give a keynote address at the
workshop on integration of spatial information at FOIS 04 (Formal Ontology
and Information Systems) in Turin, and also will debate Barry Smith on the
philosophy of ontologies; my paper on the first topic is not yet done but the
paper on the second topic, entitled "Ontology, Society and Ontotheology," is
available at

   http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/fois04.pdf

The workshop talk will focus on the relevance of recent work in cognitive
linguistics to the construction of user-friendly ontologies, especially for
spatial applications.  I will also give the philosophy lecture at the Italian
National Research Center in Naples next month, along with a more technical
talk on SCIA, and will give the "Data, Schema and Ontology Integration" talk
to Lenzerini's group in Rome (Lenzerini is another leading researcher in
database theory, I think the URL for one of his tutorials on data integration
was sent to SEEK lists a while ago).

So I think the work that Jenny Wang and I have been doing for SEEK has been a
big success, or at least, it can be described as such in reports to NSF.  It
is just seems a pity that our SEEK group leader has informed us that we are
almost out of funding and will have to stop working soon.

With all best regards,

   joseph


************************************************************************
 Joseph Goguen, Dept. Computer Science & Engineering, University of
 California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla CA 92093-0114 USA
 email: jgoguen at ucsd.edu
 www:  http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/goguen/
 phone: (858) 534-4197 [my office]; -1246 [dept office];
 -7029 [dept fax]; (858) 822-0702 [secy]
 office: 3131 Applied Physics and Math Building
 J Consciousness Studies: http://www.imprint-academic.com/jcs/
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