On the Inaugural Event of NCOR

1. On the Inaugural Event of NCOR • I bring our congratulations and best wishes to NCOR and its leadership, on behalf of my CIM3 colleagues, and members of the Ontolog community • I will introduce some of the work we’ve been bringing to the table ... and take the opportunity to pledge my support to the NCOR endeavor • In particular, I take pleasure in announcing the launch of the joint CIM3-SMI Collaborative Ontology Development Infrastructure and Service (CODS)

2. Use-Inspired Basic Research • Ontological Research is 'strategic' research that is more appropriately modeled in Donald Stokes' Pasteur's Quadrant (as use-inspired basic research) ... we should no longer treat (and fund) basic-research and applications like opposite poles • With the Internet, virtual communities, and an 'open' paradigm, we have the promises of unprecedented research capabilities in our hands now. A couple of personal insight I'd like to share: ttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815781776/

3. introducing: ONTOLOG (aka. Ontolog Forum) est. Apr.2002 • 3 co-conveners - PeterYim; LeoObrst & KurtConrad • Hosted on the CIM3 collaborative work environment infrastructure • Charter - Ontolog is an open, international, virtual community of practice, whose membership will: • Discuss practical issues and strategies associated with the development and application of both formal and informal ontologies. • Identify ontological engineering approaches that might be applied to the UBL effort, as well as to the broader domain of eBusiness standardization efforts. • Strive to advance the field of ontological engineering and semantic technologies, and to help move them into main stream applications. • Activities: • Weekly conference calls of active members • Monthly virtual Invited Speaker events • Scheduled Technical Discussions • Specific Projects: like [CCT-Rep], [Health-Ont], NHIN-RFI response, ... • Resides on a virtual collaborative work environment which serves as a dynamic knowledge repository to the community's collective intelligence • We welcome your participation – see: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/

4. Introducing to the CODS Team • Stanford Medical Informatics- developer of Protégé • An open-source ontology tool platform • Comprehensive OWL / RDF / Reasoning support • Active community with thousands of users (33,000+ registrations) • Has been used to edit ontologies with tens of thousands of concepts • CIM3 – the ISP for CWEs(Collaborative Work Environments) • Mission: to enable more effective distributed collaboration and virtual enterprise through bootstrapping collective intelligence over the Internet • Products/Services: providing a robust CWE infrastructure that enables high performance distributed project teams, virtual enterprise partners and communities of practice to work • Host to the Ontolog-Forum – an internal CoP focusing on the practical issues of both formal and informal ontologies, and their adoption into mainstream application through standardization

5. The CODS Team Up • SMI & CIM3 – to develop and host an open Collaborative Ontology Development Service (CODS) and Ontology Repository for all • the initial CODS team members: • Mark Musen, Ray Fergerson, Natasha Noy, Jonathan Cheyer and Peter Yim; with the support of their colleagues at Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI) and CIM Engineering, Inc. (CIM3)

6. Protégé – Ontology & Knowledgebase Editor

7. Software Featured in CODS • Protégé Multiuser Server • RDBMS backend (Oracle or MySQL) • PomptTAB (Protégé plugin) • Subversion server & client (TortoiseSVN client for Windows) • Apache web server & WebDAV server • Linux platform • Augmentation of the team collaboration with the CWE suite of open source collaboration tools (for portal, archived discussion, wiki & file-sharing workspace)

8. Hosted Infrastructure • Product features: • CWE – “open”, “community-only” & “secured” • Robust, scalable, enterprise performance • Secured and Fault Tolerant • Platform neutral (PC’s, Mac’s, Linux, Unix, …) • Infrastructure: • Tier-1 data center facility • 100Mbps bandwidth into the Internet backbone • Backbone: multiple OC48 & Gige self-healing fiber-ring

9. Our Hosting Facility

10. An Augmented Approach • We combine the strengths of both the Protégé ontology tools platform, and CIM3’s infrastructure to provide a collaborative ontology development environment for both humans and machines, optimizing between (sometimes conflicting) objectives like: • Human expressiveness vs. machine rigor • Average user vs. power user expectation • Secured system vs. open system • Transaction system vs. groupware system behavior • Our intent is to foster shared understanding and learning • We are trying to spur innovation, as well as organic or emergent behavior in the user communities and teams

11. Use case Scenarios • Small/medium size ontology development project • user/team registers project with CODS-Admin and uploads seed ontology • CODS-Admin opens collaborative project on Protégé multiuser server • user/team collaboratively develops ontology and commits it to the subversion repository • Publishes /releases ontology (via CODS-Admin) • Large scale ontology project (similar to above, but…) • dedicated review/accept process (through a lead editor) • probably also a full-time project manager or project administrator who will also be responsible for version and release control

12. What Next? • Pilot projects welcomed • Further refinement of process • Funding solicited to support the development of both the open source tools and the infrastructure • Skills & expertise in software engineering welcome • Skills & expertise in ontological engineering welcome • Formation and participation of a community to carry this project forward Please email: Peter Yim <peter.yim@cim3.com> or Mark Musen <musen@stanford.edu>