Friday, December 09, 2005
(new thread on Emergency Medical Ontology Project planning à [home] )
Note to ONTAG WG from Cory Casanave
Last week I introduced GSA, OsEra
and our work on “Semantic Core” as a mid to upper level ontology for
architecture.
Thus far we have primarily
“farmed”, integrated and generalized concepts out of existing architectural
languages (E.G. UML, BPMN, EDOC) and frameworks (E.G. FEARMO, ISO 11179, DRM).
Most of these source languages
and frameworks are not defined in terms of Ontologies and thus we are defining
and refactoring a common framework. However, we do not want to make
another “concept island” and thus would like to have these concepts grounded in
at least one of the well worked out upper Ontologies. This note is a
request for collaborators to do so. We need to select a base ontology and
work to align the concepts and then make the explicit relationships.
We need to select the base upper
ontology based on;
Expressiveness in an
architectural sense means that most of the concepts of modern architecture can
be defined. We have a strong focus on defining interoperability between
systems (both human and technical systems), process, interactions, roles and
collaborations. We express business rules, vocabularies, goals,
requirements and process.
Process in particular is very
important and this, of course defines behavior and change over time. As
is clear from some of our threads, context is crucial in understanding these
architectures. We understand how challenging some of these concepts are
for Ontologies but feel it is our job to capture the domain semantics, more so
than guaranteeing we can reason across them completely.
A primary purpose of these
architectures will be to support the full life-cycle of business and systems
specification as well as to support the model driven architecture pattern of
provisioning from high-level architectures to technology specifications and
implementations supporting the business architecture. We see a lot of
potential for using ontology tools and techniques to support the architectural
process, to provide more precise architectures and to get more value out of
architecture. Unlike some of the ontology visions we are more focused on
the MDA “provisioning pattern” to support enterprise scale information systems
and integration at runtime than extensive use of Ontologies as part of a
runtime infrastructure (but that is another thread!).
While we find the work to merge
upper Ontologies interesting, our focus is to use such an ontology for this
purpose.
Anyone interested in
participating should contact me directly.
Regards,
Cory Casanave
Data Access Technologies, GSA-OsEra