OntoWeb
IST-2000-29243
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for
Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
WP3 Periodic Progress Report N°:2
Covering period 1.6.2002-31.12.2002
Nicola Guarino
LADSEB-CNR
Nicola.Guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
http://ontology.ip.rm.cnr.it
Report Version: 1.0
Report Preparation Date: January 27, 2002
Classification:
Contract Start Date: 1.6.2001
Duration: 36 months
Project Co-ordinator: Dieter Fensel (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
Partners:
Project funded by the European
Community under the “Information
Society Technology” Programme (19982002)
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
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.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)-Coordinator
Faculty of Sciences,
Division of Mathematics and Computer Science
De Boelelaan 1081a
1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Fax and Answering machine: +31-(0)84-872 27 22
Mobil phone: +31-(0)6-51850619
Contactperson: Dieter Fensel
E-mail: dieter@cs.vu.nl
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
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IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
Revision Information
Revision date
Version
23-01-2003
V 0.1
27-01-2003
V1.0
Changes
Contribution from ICS-FORTH
incorporated
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
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IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
Contents
1. Summary of Key Indicators of project progress
2. Work progress overview and perspectives for future work
3. Project Management
4. Information dissemination and exploitation of results
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
-4-
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
1. Summary of Key Indicators of project progress
Concerning the WP3 tasks described in the Technical Annex, the main result of this period
is the successful completion of deliverable 3.4 (White paper on harmonization
perspectives for some promising standards), whose deliver was postponed from month 12
to month 15, and the work on the Evaluation framework for content standards
(Deliverable 3.5), whose deliver is being postponed of three months (from month 18 to
month 21), as a consequence of the previous delay.
In addition to this, most of the members involved in WP3 have been very active in
coordinating the activities of SIG1 (Content Standards), whose main achievements are
summarized below.

Launch of a mailing list for discussing specific “test cases” related to general
ontological issues common to multiple content standards;

Contribution to further development of the CIDOC-CRM standard, which
passed recently the ISO CD vote;

Contacts with the developers of a new candidate solution to the “E-Commerce
Product Classification Challenge” issued last year in cooperation with SIG4;

Launch of a new SIG1 working group on legal ontologies, leaded by Aldo
Gangemi (special issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law forthcoming)
Finally, we shall mention the organization of a tutorial on Ontologies and the Semantic
Web at the AgentLink summer school, and an invited talk by Nicola Guarino at CEN/ISSS
Electronic Commerce Working Group.
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
-5-
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
2. Work progress overview and perspectives for future work
Task 3.1 State of the art in content standards
Task completed in previous period.
Task 3.2 Comparison and evaluation of content standards
Specific activities have been carried out for each of the selected clusters of content
standards.
In the cultural repositories cluster, ICS-FORTH, exploiting the methodological
contribution of LADSEB and ITBM, continued working on CIDOC CRM, which recently
passed ISO CD vote. The CIDOC CRM standard is a successful example of ontology
harmonization, since it incorporates a “merged ontology” resulting from the integration of
an early version of CIDOC CRM (proposed by the museums community and the ABC
Harmony ontology (proposed by the Digital Libraries community). The method adopted
was purely intellectual, and this seems to be appropriate for core ontologies. It was
basically a combination of the OntoClean approach, and an identification of the impact of
functional requirements to narrowing or widening of concept scopes. Interesting
methodological aspects arised from merging classes and attributes together, and from the
agreement process itself, which implied a learning process for the ontology creators on
both sides. Moreover, an active discussion started on the comparison of various
ontological approaches for modeling events, process and time.
In the product descriptions cluster, contacts have been established with Bernardo Magnini
and Luciano Serafini from ITC-IRST, Trento, who have developed a procedure for semiautomatic alignment of product catalogs using a linguistic ontology that addresses the “ECommerce Product Classification Challenge” launched last year by SIG1 in cooperation
with SIG4. Until now, 3 specific solutions have been proposed to such challenge.
In the process descriptions cluster, cooperation with Michael Gruninger (NIST, US) has
continued on the PSL standard.
In the legal ontologies cluster, the newly established working group (whose activities are
described in D3.4), has focused on the ontology of norms, plans, and functional roles,
which have been subject of active and fruitful discussions.
Finally, the development of a report that outlines a general comparison and evaluation
framework for content standards (D3.5) has initiated along two different perspectives: the
ontology perspective (based on research work done by ISTC-CNR) and the business
perspective (based on work by Biovista). On the former side, three formal dimensions for
a rigorous evaluation of ontologies have been introduced: precision, completeness, and
accuracy. On the latter side, a number of practical dimensions have been isolated:
participation, balance of interests, timeliness-responsiveness, competition, scope,
evolutionary potential, revolution vs. evolution, existing user base, IPRs, government
support.
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
-6-
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
Task 3.3 Public Relations and Knowledge dissemination

An invited talk on OntoWeb content standardization activities was given by Nicola
Guarino at the CEN/ISSS e-Commerce Working Group meeting in Brussell, on 2223 October.

A course on ontologies and the Semantic Web has been delivered by Nicola
Guarino (together with Asun Gomez Perez) at the AgentLink Summer School in
Bologna on 9-10 July.

Besides the connection with CIDOC, ICS-FORTH had a meeting with the
CASCADE project, which is dealing with Life-Cycle Assessment, and decided on a
common workshop about ontologies.
Three new researchers affiliated to OntoWeb members joined the SIG1 on Content
Standards:
 Luc Schneider, IFOMIS, University of Leipzig
 Jesus Contrearas, ISOCO, Spain
 Rinke Hoekstra, University of Amsterdam
6 researches not officially affiliated to OntoWeb joined the SIG as corresponding
members. The list of corresponding members is now as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
GRUNINGER, Michael, NIST, USA (for links to NIST PSL)
HOBBS, Jerry, SRI International, USA (for links to DAML-S)
MARTIN, David, SRI International, USA (for links to DAML-S)
PEASE, Adam, Teknowledge, USA (for links to IEEE SUO)
RODE, Ben, Cycorp (for links to Cyc Ontology)
SMITH, Howard, co-chair BPMI.org, CTO CSC Europe, co-founder
Ontology.Org (for links to BMPL)
7. Murk Muller , LeXML Project
8. Daniela Tiscornia , IDG-CNR, Firenze, Italy (links to Italian legal standards
initiatives)
9. Giovanni Sartor , CIRSFID, Faculty of Law, University of Bologna
10. Leonardo Lesmo , University of Torino, Italy
11. Johannes Gamper , Free University of Bolzano, Italy
12. John Zeleznikow , University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Task 3.4 Co-ordination and Management
Martin Doerr (ICS-FORTH) joined Nicola Guarino in the coordination of SIG1.
3. Project Management
The two CNR members, LADSEB and ITBM, are now joined together into the Laboratory
for Applied Ontology of ISTC-CNR (Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies).
The change is operational from January, 2003.
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
-7-
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
No other member besides ISTC-CNR and Biovista contributed to the development of D3.5
during the reporting period. This explains the delivering delay.
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
-8-
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
4. Appendix A-2 Deliverables Table
DELIVERABLES TABLE
Project Number:
IST-2000-29243
Project Acronym: OntoWeb
Title:
Del. No.
Revision
Title
Type1
Classification2
Due
Date
Issue
Date
3.5
0
Comparison and evaluation framework for content standards
R
P
30/11/2002
28/2/2003
1 R:
Report; D: Demonstrator; S: Software; W: Workshop; O: Other – Specify in footnote
2 Int.:
Internal circulation within project (and Commission Project Officer + reviewers if requested)
Rest.: Restricted circulation list (specify in footnote) and Commission SO + reviewers only
IST: Circulation within IST Programme participants
FP5: Circulation within Framework Programme participants
Pub.: Public
document
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
-9-
IST Project IST-2000-29243 OntoWeb
OntoWeb: Ontology-based Information Exchange for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce
5. Appendix A-3 (a)- Breakdown of effort
Effort in person months for reporting period
1/7/2002 -30/12/2002
LADSEB-CNR
Period
WP/Task
Est.
Act.
ICS-FORTH
Period
Est.
Act..
Period
Est.
Act.
Total
Est.
Act.
WP3
Task 3.1
Task 3.2
1.5
Task 3.3
0.4
Task 3.4
0.5
Total
Period:
Total:
2.4
Est.: estimated effort ,
Est.: estimated total effort,
2.28
2.28
Act.: actual effort
Act.: accumulated effort to date
Project funded by the European Community under the “Information Society Technology” Programme (1998-2002)
Deliverable
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