[MOBY-l] ontology

[Simon Twigger]

Hi Phil,

The object ontology 'stub' that is in there was more of an experiment 
and is somewhat outside of the original scope of what we had discussed 
at the MOBY developers meeting. In trying to fit the services into 
categories it became obvious that many services could live in multiple 
categories and that its somewhat artificial to pigeon-hole them into a 
single category as we currently do (but the current 6 term ontology is 
so limited this isnt really an issue). As I got more idea of how Owl 
works, my thought was that the object ontology might be another branch 
of a moby 'uber-ontology' structure so that services could have an 
input and output properties which could be filled by classes from the 
object ontology branch. By appropriately defining the service classes 
in the ontology in terms of input and output objects from the object 
ontology we could then reason over structure and generate a reasoned 
version that would put services in all the appropriate places, rather 
than the one place we currently use. I think this is more S-MOBY 
territory but would make service discovery more flexible and dynamic - 
users would register a service in terms of input and output objects (as 
they do now) and the service ontology would then classify the service 
into the appropriate type(s) for discovery.

The object branch in the service ontology file was my attempt to 
explore how this might work in OWL by defining input and output 
properties for services and seeing if I could fill them with objects 
and have the reasoner behave as expected. I should probably prune that 
from the public version and just work on classifying the services so 
things don't get unduly complicated at this stage. I think this is a 
good way to go but we should make some executive decisions balancing 
this type of development vs getting something useable in a reasonable 
timeframe.

Simon.


On Jun 7, 2004, at 5:02 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:

>>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Twigger <simont at mcw.edu> writes:
>
>   Simon> On Jun 4, 2004, at 4:41 AM, Catherine Letondal wrote:
>
>   Simon> The first attempt at a more expansive MOBY service ontology
>   Simon> that Ive put together has branches along these lines. Its in
>   Simon> the CVS but the commit of the PNG didnt seem to work. Here's
>   Simon> the image of the graph via http:
>
>
>   Simon> http://castor.brc.mcw.edu/~simont/Moby_Service_Ontology.png
>
>
>
> Just out of interest, how is the relationship between the service
> ontology and the object ontology being expressed?
>
> Phil
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>
--

Simon N. Twigger, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology
Medical College of Wisconsin
8701 Watertown Plank Road,
Milwaukee, WI, USA
tel: 414-456-8802
fax: 414-456-6595
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