OntologyDrivenApplications: Inventory of Existing and Potential Ontology-Driven Applications

This list was produced to enable Ontolog members to identify the top 5 ontology driven applications to submit to Mills Davis, per his request. See: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2006-09/msg00031.html

Deliverable

See: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2006-10/msg00040.html

Given the intent of this list of Top Five Ontology-Driven Applications, we are pleased to announce the results ranked from first to fifth place. The number in brackets is the grand score. You might find the actual patterns of interest in that the first place received attention from over half of the raters but was NOT their first choice. No application received more than 1 first choice vote. Thus, as you might well expect, there is not a lot of clear agreement about the future....but a concensus is observed about the importance of ontologies in standards development.

1st D2 - Using ontologies to align / translate among standards (terminology remediations) [20 points ]

2nd D3 - Building ontologies from standards (translating standards into ontological representations that can be used by ontology-aware tools, e.g., inference engines) [14 points]

3rd D1 - An ontology of existing standards [10 points]

4th C2 - Standards in health informatics and emergency management [10 points]

5th B4 - Using ontology to improve data quality [9 points]

-from Bob Smith, on behalf of the Ontolog Forum / 2006.10.06

Solicitation - prepared and subsqeuently analysed by Bob Smith & Kurt Conrad

Please rank the most important applications using the provided ID numbers and submit your rankings by posting a message to the Ontolog Forum mailing list (http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2006-10/msg00004.html). Rankings will need to be posted by Thursday, 2006.10.05, to enable a consolidated list to be forwarded to Mills Davis, in time for his conference.

A0 - OWL RFC references
- A1 - Web portal
- A2 - Multimedia collections
- A3 - Corporate web site management
- A4 - Design documentation
- A5 - Agents and services
- A6 - Ubiquitous computing

B0 - Using ontologies in database design
- B1 - Databases to hold ontologies - from simple catalogues to First Order Logic.
- B2 - Using ontology for data retrieval and HCI
- B3 - Ontology mediation between databases
- B4 - Using ontology to improve data quality
- B5 - Procedures to develop model-specific ontologies to support data profiling, reconstruction, and repurposing

C0 - Health care
- C1 - Web services registry of standards
- C2 - Standards in health informatics and emergency management
  - C2a - Alerting / warning
  - C2b - Information gathering at county, regional, state, and federal levels
  - C2c - Emergency data exchange language
  - C2d - Common alerting protocol
  - C2e - Resource messaging
  - C2f - Hospital availability exchange

D0 - Standards development
- D1 - An ontology of existing standards
- D2 - Using ontologies to align / translate among standards (terminology remediations)
- D3 - Building ontologies from standards (translating standards into ontological representations that can be used by ontology-aware tools, e.g., inference engines)
- D4 - Creating the next generation of standards as ontologies.

E0 - Other
- E1 - Predictive data mining, particularly in the area of intelligence
- E2 - SOA-based applications, such as (OASIS's) ebSOA-based business and safety / security / emergency preparedness cases
- E3 - Semantic Agent-based paradigm application: such as traffic management system to also cater for information needs of agents in/out of traffic system. This could lead to value added services for, say, fleet management, ambulance dispatch and guidance, etc
- E4 - Long-running process constructed on the fly. This involves discovery, mediation, composition, and execution of a sequence of (semantic) services to intelligently satisfy user requirements.
- E5 - Decision-support systems, such as:
  - E5a - The use of weak semantics to improving collaborative filtering applied to factors affecting the decision and cross-impact analyses
  - E5b - The use of strong semantics to enable/improve dynamic mathematical modeling
- E6 - Conceptual interoperability among simulation systems (at multiple levels)
  - E6a - Neutral authoring (where a mid-level ontology can serve to control the access to common terms between applications)
- E7 - Use of first-order process ontologies to test processes for consistency with the rules, policies, and protocols they are supposed to adhere to.

Community Ranking & Input

see: "[ontolog-forum] Request to Rank "Top 5" Ontology-Driven Applications" thread(s) at - http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2006-10/threads.html

Follow-on Work

Ref. the discussion at the Ontolog Community Planning conference call on Thu 2006.10.05, a project has been started to more comprehensively inventory existing and future ontology-driven applications, and possibly to assess, prioritize and/or rank them afterwards. See: OntologyDrivenApplications