I had an action to write up my notes from the discussion session at URSW in Karlruhe. I will add as addresses to this email the people we have as registered in Karlsruhe who were not on the URW3 mailing list. For the most part, I have not removed duplicates in case there have been email address changes not reflected since the last maintenance of the URW3 list. The dialog, as I captured it, is as follows, but feel free to offer corrections or extensions.

Trevor: The XG skimmed over the use cases we catalogued.

Peter: We should concentrate on 2 or 3 characteristic use cases for which there would be data we could use to develop things further.

Claudia: The work the XG did was to convince people that uncertainty reasoning is needed and useful, and that was accomplished. A next step would be to show how to produce annotations or a different model for annotations. We should use data from real problems. If we can annotate using the uncertainty ontology, we should do that or replace/extend the current ontology to meet the needs we see.

Umberto: Question whether something like Fuzzy OWL or other extensions from the DL community will suffice. The question of capturing vagueness vs. probability. The uncertainty community knows the formalisms to use, and it would be useful to hold tutorials to explain what to do and which tools can do it. RACER implemented probabilistic OWL but there were problems with the model and it didn't work well. What we need is a standard to represent data for a given formalism. A likely methodology would be to explain how to build ontologies when need to include uncertainty. [Kathy was not aware of an implementation of probabilistic OWL in RACER. Can Umberto provide a reference?]

Kathy: how to demonstrate this is the challenge. The amniocentesis example is good.

Peter: back to Ora's keynote, AI symbolic logic was not very successful on its own but there is now more success when combining with non-symbolic. Let's be pragmatic and show something works.

Ora: Symbolic methods reinforcing non-symbolic; gives some underpinnings to non-symbolic. What was found was symbolic logic alone wasn't enough.

Ken: The discussion is good but let's look at the list of possible venues to continue work (slide 15 of LaskeyLaskey presentation).

-- Continue with the URSW workshop series, using it as a forum to discuss advances in theory and practice

-- Approach other communities, such as those dealing with health care and life sciences, and form a wider collaboration

–Continue research aspects

–Provide concrete problems against which to develop solutions

-- Develop a charter for and establish a new XG to work the items recommended by the URW3-XG

-- Investigate funding opportunities to

–formalize a dedicated effort to pursue the issues

–develop implementable solutions and tools in a reasonable time frame

All: agreed to continue URSW workshop series

Trevor: Dealing with other communities can get you lost in their specific problems.

Claudia: Next move is to understand our problems and our goals.

Pavel: Collaboration can be beneficial.

Kathy: Look at a challenge problem (as a way of connecting with another domain)?

Uwe: What we need are real data sets.

Ken: The approach could be to develop more details in how we would approach uncertainty representation while we investigate domains that can provide problems with sufficient data. Deepen our understanding without getting immersed in the details of someone else's problem while still looking for beneficial collaboration.

Umberto: Open project, 5 page abstract, Future Emerging Technologies.

ACTION: Umberto to look further into this.

[back to challenge problem and engaging other community]

Ken: are we ready for challenge problems?

Umberto: Tough to find area not already covered but done with uncertainty.

Kathy: Judged competition for use case?

Claudia: Too soon for competition. New XG is a good idea. Mailing list only is not enough.

Trevor: Ken and Kathy did a lot of work as chairs. Will they do it again?

Kathy: No time while managing large project.

Ken: Currently chairing W3C task force and can provide technical support for running XG but not available for regular chair responsibilities.

Umberto: Need to check but might be available to chair.

Kathy: Paulo might be convinced to co-chair.

Ken: Need to get ideas together for a new charter.

ACTION (to Claudia): use URW3 mailing list to begin discussion of charter.

ACTION (to Ken): compile and distribute notes from this discussion

Begin forwarded message:

From: Claudia d'Amato <claudia.damato@di.uniba.it>
Date: November 7, 2008 3:32:58 AM EST
To: Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org>, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu>, Thomas Lukasiewicz <lukasiew@gmail.com>, Trevor Martin <Trevor.Martin@bristol.ac.uk>, Fernando Bobillo <fbobillo@decsai.ugr.es>, Peter Vojtas <Peter.Vojtas@mff.cuni.cz>, Umberto Straccia <umberto.straccia@isti.cnr.it>, Matthias Nickles <M.L.Nickles@cs.bath.ac.uk>, "Paulo Cesar G. Costa" <pcosta@gmu.edu>, "'N. Fanizzi'" <fanizzi@di.uniba.it>, Mitch Kokar <mkokar@vistology.com>, Francis Fung <ffung@iet.com>, Pavel Smrz <smrz@fit.vutbr.cz>, gstoil@image.ntua.gr, jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk, vkashyap1@partners.org
Subject: After URSW 2008

Dear all,

the last edition of URSW 2008 workshop is concluded. We had very interesting sessions and also we have had discussions about how to continue our activities. Main proposals are:

- approaching a project proposal (maybe a European project). Umberto Straccia will check the open possibilities
- continuing with a new XG for other two years

Regarding the second point the ideas are:

- make a sketch proposal of how to tag ontologies with uncertain information, focusing on methodologies
- set up a survey of the highlighted methods (bayesian, fuzzy...) for managing uncertain knowledge
- try to give guidelines on the usage of a method w.r.t. certain conditions

Ken asked me to write this email. Other proposals are obviously welcomed. The idea is to make a plan of our next two years activities with the goal of giving more impact on our results.

Regards,

Claudia

P.S.: it seems that the member-only mailing list is closed so I have used the email address of each of you, I hope that I have forgotten none. If you see someone missing please forward this email. Thanks