ANSI X3H4 standards for information interchange

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Message-id: <9107171803.AA09379@venera.isi.edu>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 91 14:01:49 EDT
From: sowa@watson.ibm.com
To: SRKB@isi.edu, INTERLINGUA@isi.edu
Cc: SKPEREZ@mcimail.com
Subject: ANSI X3H4 standards for information interchange

To SRKB participants,

The ANSI Technical Committee X3H4 IRDS (Information Resource and
Dictionary Systems) is developing standards for information interchange.
Their efforts have evolved from database work, where the definitional
languages have generally been less expressive than the knowledge
representations in the AI community.  But they are now considering
constraints and object-oriented representations that require the full
expressive power of at least first-order logic; they also need to
specify time dependencies that may require temporal logic as well.

Some members of the ANSI X3H4 committee have read my book, Conceptual
Structures, and were impressed with conceptual graphs as a very readable
and expressive form of logic.  Sandra Perez, the chair of Task Group
X3H4.6 on schema integration, said that they are "interested in
conceptual graph technology to support our analysis work as well as
to provide the theoretical foundation for the conceptual schema and the
neutral model we are developing....  The responsibilities of X3H4.6
include:  technical reports and standards for the conceptual schema
for the IRDS; functional specifications for model management services;
standards to support integration of modeling paradigms and user community
information models; and support of the integration and harmonization of
information models for national, international, and industry standards."

They have invited me to give a tutorial on conceptual graphs at the next
X3H4 meetings in Seattle on August 5 to 8.  They have also scheduled
working sessions to consider the mappings between conceptual graphs and
other representations that are used in database design and development.

I'm sending this note to inform all SRKB participants of these activities
and of the possibility of getting involved with them.  Any standards
that are proposed for database representations should also have a clean
mapping to and from any proposed Knowledge Interchange Formats that may
be developed by the AI community.

For further information about the ANSI efforts and the meetings in
Seattle in August, contact Sandra Perez.  Email: skperez@mcimail.com,
Tel: 703-425-9268.

John Sowa