OPEN KNOWLEDGEPaola Di Maio, University of StrathclydeOKCon 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

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 / 1How 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

1.Common, agreed definitions of terms in use by a community

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

2. Semantic mappings/clusters among different vocabularies

3. Definition of schemas and formats4. 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

• Keep the open flowing

• Let's talk

• Find me on Linkedin, Facebook Skype

• myNamedotsurname @ gmail