[SCL] Telecon and SCL progress

[Jim Hendler]

>Greetings, and sorry for the delay in getting started.
>
>This email is an attempt to summarize the progress we think we made 
>at the Santa Fe ISO meeting a few weeks ago on the basic language, 
>and to outline the various things that need to be done. Hopefully we 
>can schedule a telecon for next week (this week I will be at the W3C 
>plenary meeting) to start discussing these.
>
>TELECONS
>
>Let us try to start having a telecon. We can schedule the second one 
>after we see how the first one goes. Early in the day US time seems 
>best for European members, so I suggest that we try for 0900 CT/1000 
>EST/1600GMT/1700 CET, on Monday 10 March.  If anyone finds this 
>time/day impossibly inconvenient, please suggest another.  The 
>number to call is (US) 413-351-4140. Please say your name when you 
>arrive so we can keep track of who is on the call. I expect the 
>original volunteers to phone in if possible, but others are welcome 
>if they feel they can contribute. The basic rule is that anyone I 
>can talk to is liable to be asked to actually do something.

I'm afraid I'll be in Japan for the week - but since I can't make any 
other time, I'll just read the scribing after...

>
>PROGRESS
>[snip]
>THINGS TO DO
>5. ANNOTATIONS AND COMMENTS SYNTAX

can we do social meaning?  (oh sorry, never mind)

>ssions and may share variables with other expressions.
>
>6.  RELATIONS BETWEEN ONTOLOGIES
>
>Practical ontology engineering seems to be getting similar to 
>software engineering, in that large-scale ontologies go through 
>large numbers of revisions, are constructed by combining parts of 
>other ontologies and so on. Several practical languages include 
>special syntax for keeping track of this kind of information. 
>Particular examples include (where 'item' is a definition or axiom 
>or term)
>
>this ontology imports material from that ontology
>this ontology (item) is a revised version of that ontology (item)
>this ontology was written by ... on date .... with number/id .....
>this item is deprecated in favor of this other item....
>
>This kind of information can be informally incorporated into text in 
>wrapped comments, but it might be worth spending some time to try to 
>identify common patterns and provide them as part of the syntax, or 
>maybe as part of a special ontology (?)
>
>Issue: this requires a systematic way to refer to ontologies. Do we 
>need a syntax for naming ontologies?
>
>(Comment. Moving in W3C circles has brought home to me very forcibly 
>the need to make distinctions between ontologies, documents, strings 
>of characters, files, etc etc., all of which distinctions are 
>invisible from the point of view of traditional logical syntax. Just 
>a heads-up to the members of the group to whom this issue seems 
>trivial... :-)

I like these issues - they're ones we couldn't talk about in the 
ontology group because the DL guys were too busy discussing the 
important issues they focus on.

-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler at cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  240-731-3822 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler