Subject: RE: RDF collaboration

From: "Greg FitzPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 15:22:10 +0200

This is a response to those that have expressed interest in our call for
participation the text of which is repeated here:

>Would anyone be interested in collaboration on an RDF project for the
United
>nation statistical standards;

 >ISIC rev 3  Economic Activity

http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/class/website/isic3/i3_top.htm

  >and CPC  V1.0 Classification of products

http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/class/website/cpc1/c1_top.htm

>These will be/are translated to all the official languages of the United
>Nations.  These naming conventions can serve as the basis of many a schema.

To those (quoted below) who have answered the first call:

Thank you for your responses.  Here is some more detail:

For the last two years we have worked with a project  called SKi.
http://www.skical.org/index.html

  In as few words as possible, SKi is a metadata project to facilitate the
description of resources.   The resources we are describing are organized
from the POV of a person wishing to spend time.

You may (or may not :-)) want to know that we call this person a DIP ( by
Description Identifiable Person), and the resources addressed, DITs (by
Description Identifiable Thing).

Sweden is unique in its clublish organizational structures, and we were
able, with meager government financing, to bring together the national
organizations for culture, sport, tourism, education and community
government and forge an agreement upon a unified syntax for the resources
covered by these organizations.  This syntax is based upon the Wha
interrogatives which (we assume) represent the needs of potential time
spenders.

For those wishing to know more about the Wha interrogatives and SKi I am
enclosing a paper submitted and read at INET99 in San Jose.  see enclosures

This agreement has reached IETF draft status and is published at:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-many-ical-ski-00.txt

The SKi group originally worked within the Dublin Core community, but
migrated to the CALSCH WG of the IETF, attracted by the large amount of work
that had been done in the area of time.  The CALSCH WG, beginning with ISO
8601, had created mechanisms for complicated time postings, time-zones,
daylight savings times and recurrence as well as the interoperability of
calendar applications.  Here is the resulting RFC:

http://www.imc.org/rfc2445

Furthermore this WG has enjoyed wide-scale industry participation as a
glance at the mailing list archives will show.

If you're wondering, yes there are several XML variations on this RFC, but
none currently have the consensus support of the CALSCH WG.

The SKiCal draft is an extension of RFC2245, necessary since the later
document is primarily concerned with business meetings. Here is a list of
differences.  They are included in the SKiCal draft and you can skip them
for now if you wish.

"A typical iCal user will consider their Calendar application an
   important, if not indispensable, tool in their interaction with
   fellow workers in the same company - or same cross-company project.
   Most SKiCal users will not use a computer based calendar program
   more than casually, if at all.

   iCal objects will invariably end up in a user's calendar.  SKiCal
   objects will more likely be printed in newspapers & print-on-demand
   compilations, presented in mobile browsers (WAP) and desktop
   browsers, shown on text television, auto-voiced over telephones,
   pushed or called-up through an assortment of yet to be invented
   digiphernalia.

   Most iCal objects will be created by known organizers, for known
   attendees, of a known quantity, meeting in known places, dealing
   with known topics.  Many SKiCal objects will be created by unknown
   organizers, for unknown attendees, of an unknown quantity, meeting
   in unknown places, to take part in unknown events.

   SKiCal users will typically search for certain property combination
   outcomes amongst millions of possible property combinations.  iCal
   users will  be invited to join in on specific events, many of which
   will not come as a surprise.

   SKiCal knowledge retrieval processes will be both and crisp and
   fuzzy.  iCal processes will almost always be crisp.

   A SKiCal object is always the description of an external (to the
   SKiCal object) thing.  An iCal object will often be self descriptive
   with some references to external things, such as a meeting room."

Though SKiCal goes a long way towards solving Syntax problems, it does not
address the semantic issues arising from the multi-language, multi-cultural,
multi-discipline, aspects involved, specially with the time-spender POV we
are working for.  Our guiding purpose has been to strive towards the bare
minimalism of the WHA interrogatives in our basic model and provide for more
complex term structures with the help of RDF or RDF-similar namespace
solutions.

Just recently (on Monday in Brussels) the Swedish National Tourist Board,
presented SKi for the ENTO, European national tourist organizations and a
working group was formed around the SKi syntax and for the exploration of
naming convention standards for the European Community.  Though there have
been and are several initiatives ongoing in this area - none have been able
to reach any form of consensus, most notably the CEN TC 329 (EUROPEAN
COMMITTEE FOR STANDARDIZATION)   and the IntouriSME project ( both, which I
am afraid are strangely confidential, and without useable links).

Our proposal is to use the statistical classifications schemes as
represented by ISIC rev 3 and CPC, both of which are public, well built, and
most importantly mapable to the world's major classification schemes such as
the North American Naics http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/class/naicscan.pdf and
the European NACE, as a base structure for our naming conventions.

Appropriate guidelines for this work are very pedagogically and astutely
laid out in the following document.

http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/class/bestprac.pdf

by Eivand Hoffman, ILO and Mary Chamie, UNSD

For reasons explained in the above document, statistical naming conventions
have good reason to resist ad-hoc modifications, and it is therefore
necessary to create a "way-station" between these international codes and
user APIs.

This way-station would maintain map-ability between the "static & stable"
international statistic codes and the more dynamic, market driven, thesauri
needed for our purposes.

It is our intention to promote and participate in the forming of a Working
Group, whose purpose will be to 1)

1. Create an RDF structure for ISIC rev 3 and CPC V1.1
2. Create RDF structures for "naming markets" mapable to the above standards
3. Attempt the creation of RDF structures to facilitate mapping, scalability
and language conversion amongst the above.

Those of you with RDF experience will note that task NR 1. is not that
difficult an undertaking, considering the concise, strict and brief format
of these codes, but we hope to extend this format with properties for
publishing of Images, graphics, anecdotal text, examples and descriptions.

If you are still interested please let me know.  If you have the time to be
critical or helpful in any other way please make yourself heard.

Greg FitzPatrick
.......
The initial three replies to my posting:

 This looks very interesting!  Please provide additional details.
 Regards,
 Bill Fersch

we are very much interested in such projects.
We have RDF experience (e.g. look at http://www.w3.org/RDF/ and search for
"Decker") and, probably more important,
experience in building, using and merging large ontologies in the
SKC-project
( http://www-db.stanford.edu/SKC/ )

Could you provide some me details about your planned project?

Stefan Decker

We have done a lot of work with RDF and metadata. I am a manager at the IBM
Almaden research center.
Your note stirred my curiosity. What kind of collaboration are you talking
about? I would be interested in any
research aspects of it.

Neel Sundaresan

Neel Sundaresan, PhD
Manager
eMerging Internet Technologies
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road
San Jose, CA 95120