Justification for missing deliverable 3.3 (Proposal to ... - STI Innsbruck

Justification for missing deliverable 3.3
(Proposal to the W3C for activating an ad hoc
group on content standards)
Author: Nicola Guarino
Affiliation: LADSEB-CNR, Italy.
Identifier Deliverable 3.1.
Class Deliverable 3.3
Version 1.0
Version date January, 2002
Status
final
Distribution
Public
Responsible Partner LADSEB-CNR

OntoWeb Consortium
This document is part of a research project funded by the IST Programme of the Commission of the
European Communities as project number IST-2000-29243.
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Revision Information
Revision date Version Changes
22 Jan 2002 1.0
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1 Justification for this missing deliverable
Within task 3.3 of WP3, a specific subtask appearing in the OntoWeb Technical
Annex mentions the preparation of a proposal to the W3C for activating an ad-hoc
working group on content standards for the Web. As an output of this task, a white
paper to be published as Deliverable 3.3 was foreseen by month 6.
In the course of the project, we realized that
1. our time estimate was too optimistic, and
2. our strategy of interaction with W3C needed to be adjusted.
Both these conclusions were largely influenced by the foundation, in early November
2001, of the W3C Web Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group 1 . Although this group
seems to focus more on language than on content, the boundary between the two
aspects is not so crisp in the community, and it seems that a “foundational” layer
addressing a minimal set of ontological primitives (like relations between parts and
wholes, or meta-level distinctions between types and roles), could be considered
within the WebOnt WG’s scope. So we cannot ignore these aspects, and it is
important that, in our future interaction with the W3C, we consider the use cases that
are already being accumulated within the OntoWeb WG.
A further event that influenced our decision was the establishment of a cooperation
agreement between OntoWeb and the CEN/ISSS Electronic Commerce Working
Group 2 , which has been managed within WP3. We are convinced that this
cooperation could be of great help for establishing an effective interaction with the
world of industrial IT standards, and with the W3C in particular.
Finally, in the discussion at the Dec 2001 Amsterdam OntoWeb meeting it was felt
that much more preparatory work would be required and effort levels needed
afterwards be considered before proposing a new WG under the W3C - and that was
indicated by people who already had experience of such involvement.
In conclusion, we have decided to:
• explore in more detail, in the next months, the opportunities of establishing an
interaction with the W3C WebOnt WG concerning a minimal set of general
ontological primitives to be added to the Web Ontology Language;
• discuss with the CEN/ISSS EC WG the ontology standardization needs that
seem to be more relevant for e-commerce applications within the semantic web
(in particular, the recently proposed MULECO project)
• involve all the OntoWeb Content Standards SIG in the preparation of a white
paper for the W3C, to be published by the time of the next OntoWeb meeting
in Sardinia (June 13, 2002). This white paper will be based on the preliminary
results of task 3.1, and it will correspond to Deliverable 3.4. Part of the content
originally foreseen for Deliverable 3.3 will be incorporated into such
deliverable.
1 http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt
2 http://www.cenorm.be/isss/workshop/ec
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