OPEN KNOWLEDGE Paola Di Maio, University of Strathclyde OKCon 28 March 2009, UCL Spatial Institute CONTENTS: About ‘openness’ Openness and Technology Ontology, and Open Ontology Shared Vocabularies as a Path to Opening Up Knowledge Representation

CONTENTS:

About ‘openness’

Openness and Technology

Ontology, and Open Ontology

Shared Vocabularies as a Path to Opening Up Knowledge Representation

ABOUT OPENNESS 'OPEN' phenomenon very interesting! Hard to define: what is openness? The systems thinking view of openness is: “ An open system is a state in which a system continuously interacts with its environment. Open systems are those that maintain their state and exhibit the characteristics of openness (wikipedia).”

Openness can be defined by: 1.context dependency (science, politics, education, technology etc)‏ 2.multidimensionality 3. less constraints 4. flexible boundaries 5. Degree of Interaction Openness is enabled by : Technologies such as internet, web Networked technologies help to maximise and make use of interactions OPENNESS REQUIRES SUITABLE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURES

TRANS-, CROSS-, MULTI-, INTER- DISCIPLINARITY

INTEGRATED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

ONTOLOGIES - Ontologies are used in support of complex information systems development and management. - They consist of semantic and logical constraints defined by: domain boundaries, axioms, classes, relations, vocabularies. Traditionally, they have been 'authoritative' and 'top down'. - Trend Toward OPEN ONTOLOGY trend (PROJECTS: myontology, viewbased ontology, various folksonomies, oOR etc)‏ A definition of Open Ontology: http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Ontology

OPEN ONTOLOGY REQUIREMENTS / 1 How can you tell if an ontology is open? It should: • declare what high level knowledge (upper level ontology) it references • state explicitly the 'sources of knowledge' (aka , provenance of axioms)‏ • state what kind of reasoning/inference supports/it is based on, support queries via natural language as well as machine language, • be visible, searchable and support queries via a Web based interface that does not require any plug-in and API for users to download, • allow users to provide feedback that should be taken into account in subsequent iterations, be documented and annotated, and available in different file formats including Open Document

OPEN ONTOLOGY REQUIREMENTS/2 More Possibilities: It should • be 'easy to understand' by generic users without specialized skills and guidelines should be provided as how it can be used to support development practices, • be implementation and platform independent; this means, for example that an ontology should not only exist encoded as OWL/RDF but expressed and formalized in a format that can be understood and reused by alternative ontology languages • support one view of the world if required, and allow for simultaneous multiple views, meaning that it should aim to be perfectly elastic, flexible and adaptable, • take into account language and cultural diversity, and corresponding different value systems and knowledge representation requirements, • be supported by tutorials and educational materials at different levels of specialization

SHARED VOCABULARIES Common, agreed definitions of terms in use by a community Shared understanding of roles and properties identified with the terms in use 2. Semantic mappings/clusters among different vocabularies 3. Definition of schemas and formats 4. Accessible, interpretable, usable See Vocamp.org (open community!)‏ Knoodl.com (emergency management vocabulary part the of EIIF W3C Incubator group)‏

SHARED VOCABULARIES

Common, agreed definitions of terms in use by a community

Shared understanding of roles and properties identified with the terms in use

2. Semantic mappings/clusters among different vocabularies

3. Definition of schemas and formats

4. Accessible, interpretable, usable

See Vocamp.org (open community!)‏

Knoodl.com (emergency management vocabulary part the of EIIF W3C Incubator group)‏

MY CURRENT PROJECTS Networked Architectures Systems of Systems Open Ontologies Knowledge Reuse and Learning Human Aspects of Semantic Technologies

Networked Architectures

Systems of Systems

Open Ontologies

Knowledge Reuse and Learning

Human Aspects of Semantic Technologies

Keep the open flowing Let's talk Find me on Linkedin, Facebook Skype myNamedotsurname @ gmail

Keep the open flowing

Let's talk

Find me on Linkedin, Facebook Skype

myNamedotsurname @ gmail