2005-01-18

Situation and Identity

Another paper mined from already quoted page about Semantic Web Software Engineering Task Force. Under the general title comes a very technical subtitle
"A Generalisation of Inverse Functional Properties" which does not speak much to people not aware of arcane details of OWL terminology. "Inverse Functional Properties" should be better named "Identifying Properties", since, according to OWL semantics, two individuals sharing the same value for such a property must be considered as the same one. The abstract says:
This paper examines the notions of situation and identity on the semantic web. The authors define how identity and situation apply to the semantic web, and present methods for using Inverse Functional Properties to utilise these definitions. We present the notion of a Composite Inverse Functional Property in order to exploit the structure of data for identification, and show how these can be used to apply context specific identification.

Context specific identification is really the concept to highlight here.

Object Co-identification on the Semantic Web

Phil Tetlow and Jeff Z. Pan have published for the new SWBPD Task Force on "Semantic Web and Software Engineering" a page called "Relevant Topics, Publications and Validated Ideas". Among those, the title paper reviews in details identification issues and relevant technologies: names, keys, and more interesting, heuristic methods based on probabilistic approach.

How many "person" concepts in the Semantic Web?

Need to define "Person"in your local ontology? Unless you want to add yet another identifier for this concept, your contribution to the Semantic Mess, go ask Swoogle Ontology Dictionary and pick up your choice. At first ranks come with no surprise classes from FOAF http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person and WordNet http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Person.
But there are about 400 other SW resources, classes and properties using the same name. Food for thought ... Why so many already? What about re-usability? What about aggregation of data and federation of knowledge? (see previous post) How many of those resources declare equivalence with other ones? And how many are actually used?

2005-01-13

Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't

Google's director of search quality discusses challenges of automation, knowledge, spam, and even politics. One among a series of interesting articles of AlwaysOn, excerpted from SDForum's Semantic Technologies Seminar, cohosted by AlwaysOn, TopQuadrant, and Enterprise Architect.

Glossary of terms relating to thesauri and other forms of structured vocabulary for information retrieval

Confusion often arises when different people use terms to mean different things. This list is based on definitions drawn up by a group of four consultants who specialise in the development and use of thesauri and other forms of structured vocabulary for information retrieval, Stella Dextre Clarke, Alan Gilchrist, Ron Davies and Leonard Will. The authors do not claim that these definitions are "correct" and that other meanings are "wrong", but recommend these definitions as being a consistent and well-defined set which will aid communication by encouraging everyone to use the same words with the same meaning.

2005-01-07

John Sechrest, on the bluoxen.org mailing list, had this to say about LID:

a) It is distributed and gives personal control over access
b) It is available now
This should be compared to the Identity Commons I-Names that I mentioned here.

2005-01-06

Identity Management Webcast

This is an online webcast. Don't know that it costs anything except all the personal information they can wring out of you to sign up for it.

In this webcast you will learn how identity management is helping organizations to meet their key business initiatives by driving new online revenue opportunities, enabling a company to securely extend business beyond its four walls, and helping corporations to mitigate risk while complying with new regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley.

Topics to be Covered:

> Identity Management defined and the stages of a successful deployment
> The business drivers and benefits of Identity Management
> Provisioning and Access Management technologies
> Selecting the right Identity Management vendor
> Do's and Don'ts - Deploying an Identity Management solution

Latest Topic Maps Reference Model

The latest opus by Steven R. Newcomb and Patrick Durusau, dated 2004-11-07, is found at the link. The document includes definitions of subject identity properties, which, in some sense, are the subject of this weblog.