workshop on shared, reusable KBs
Tom Gruber <Gruber@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>
Full-Name: Tom Gruber
Message-id: <2874896174-9905514@KSL-Mac-69>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 91 22:16:14 PST
From: Tom Gruber <Gruber@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>
To: Shared KB working group <srkb@venera.isi.edu>
Cc: Steve Cross <cross@darpa.mil>, kr-advisory@venera.isi.edu
Subject: workshop on shared, reusable KBs
Invitation for the First Workshop on Shared, Reusable Knowledge
Bases of the DARPA Knowledge Representation Standards effort
Dear working group participants:
Thank you for agreeing to contribute to the DARPA sponsored working
group on shared, reusable knowledge bases. This note will describe
the first workshop, which is coming up soon -- just before AAAI Spring
Symposium. We are fortunate that all but one of the working group
members will be able to make the first workshop on those dates.
Here is the relevant information.
TRAVEL DETAILS:
* The workshop will be held on March 24-25 at Pajaro Dunes, a
development of luxury homes and condos on the ocean near Monterey.
A map and full directions will be mailed to you in the packet described below.
Breakfast and lunch will be catered; dinner will be enjoyed at a nice
restaurant. Participants will stay in private rooms in odd-looking
beach houses. We will spend our working hours in a large living room
and/or sun deck, hopefully with a view. We will provide an overhead
projector, whiteboard, and MacIntoshes.
* People can arrive Saturday night March 23 or early Sunday morning,
and the meetings will run all day Sunday and Monday, starting around
9:00am. Pajaro Dunes is about a 90 minute drive from Palo Alto.
We expect that most people will leave on Monday evening; with advance notice,
we will assist with arrangements for those wishing to stay over monday night.
* Cost: $150 room and board; $150 registration. Participants are asked to
pay these costs out of their own research funds. Since most of you are
attending the AAAI Spring Symposium, please keep in mind that reduced airfares
>From saturday travel may significantly offset the cost of attending this
workshop. Please contact Bob Neches (neches@isi.edu, 213/822-1511) if you
cannot afford to attend on your own resources. He will assist you in
exploring alternate sources of funding. It is our hope that financial
issues will not preclude invitees from attending.
* Registration: Please send confirmation to Kim Luu <luu@isi.edu>,
who will be able to answer questions about logistics. Include your
physical mail address, phone and fax numbers, and a brief title for
your presentation if you wish to give one (see agenda below).
MATERIALS REQUESTED FROM PARTICIPANTS:
1. A one to three page position statement (not for publication)
to Gruber by March 10, preferably in electronic form (text or TeX).
Please address some of the following questions:
* "What is the purpose or goal of knowledge sharing in your work,
and what form does shared/reusable knowledge take in your
system?"
* "What should be the unifying vision for knowledge sharing and
reuse?" (e.g., Stefik "The Next Knowledge Medium" (AI Magazine)
or Lenat and Feigenbaum "On the Thresholds of Knowledge" (AAAI and
AI Journal))
* "How could the community cooperate to reach the vision?"
- "How should reusable knowledge bases be developed?"
- "How should reusable knowledge bases be disseminated?"
- "What are some useful pilot experiments?"
* "What are the critical research issues that need to get solved?"
The purpose is to get everyone thinking about the issues and to seed
the discussions with good ideas. We will distribute them in advance
to the participants.
2. Optionally, also submit a hardcopy of an existing paper on your project for
distribution at the workshop. To arrange copying, please ensure that your
paper is received at USC/ISI by close of business on friday, March 15.
(Copying facilities at the workshop site are limited; if you do not take
advantage of the advance copying service, please plan on bringing at least 20
copies of any materials you would like to distribute at the meeting.) Papers
should be addressed to Kim Luu, Workshop On Shared, Reusable Knowledge Bases,
USC / Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, CA
90292.
DISTRIBUTED TO PARTICIPANTS:
In the coming weeks you will receive in the mail a packet containing
this letter, copies of previous email messages, directions and map to
Pajaro Dunes, and background papers related to the DARPA knowledge
representation standards effort.
PRELIMINARY WORKSHOP AGENDA
* Opening statements by the organizers: "Toward a Unifying Vision"
* Keynote. Possible topics:
- Literary publication of knowledge
- Knowledge as medium vs. resource
* Presentations of participant projects
Each working group member will have the opportunity to give a
relatively short presentation on his or her perspective on
shared, reusable knowledge bases, describing work done in their
relevant projects. These will be informal, interactive talks
lasting about 20 minutes plus about an equal duration of time for
discussion. We will sketch a "state of the art chart"
summarizing the goals, methods, etc. of reported projects.
* Group exercise: build an ontology in real time (experimental)
We will choose a good-sized topic like modelling a household
device or process, and will send out a description of the domain
in advance. If you would like to propose a candidate, let us
know.
* Specification of format for final papers and for evaluation of ontologies
(See "Final Products for the Working Group", below)
- Where are payoffs, what works, what constitutes success?
- What do we need to know about experiments in knowledge sharing
and reuse in order to meaningfully compare and contrast them?
* Plan possible community experiments.
The working group is chartered to identify collaboration
experiments in which producers and users of significant
knowledge bases share and reuse others' knowledge bases and
tools. Many of the working group members have existing systems
that could participate in and benefit from such experiments.
While we are all in one place, we will begin planning for
multi-group collaborations. Open questions include:
- What knowledge sharing approaches might work?
(e.g., sharing a single KB, sharing ontologies, sharing
tools, sharing a hypermedia document space)
- What domain areas might pay off in the near term?
- How might one leverage off the work of commercial data
exchange standards and tool integration frameworks?
- What are the cognitive and sociological issues in
collaborative representation design?
* Discussion of issues
- Unifying visions
- Formal/structured vs. semistructured knowledge,
integrating representation of data and knowledge
- Methodologies and tools for building and using shared KBs
and services
- Controlling shared vocabulary
- Correspondence theories: mapping among languages
- Representation of design rationale
- Distribution and use of ontologies: role of interlingua, etc.
- Relationships to DARPA engineering initiatives
* Wrapup
- agenda for next workshop
- action items with respect to experiments and research issues
FINAL PRODUCTS FOR THIS WORKING GROUP (over two years)
* Book of papers / state of art survey
- include a chapter by editors that encapsulates recommendations
for tools, methodologies, and future funding directions
- each working group member describes own effort
- format for papers decided at first workshop
* Publication of proposed ontologies
- formal representation for distribution
- in electronic and paper media
- tools that support development and reuse
- test suite examples of using ontologies
* Clearinghouse
- near term mechanism for maintaining the library of ontologies
- mechanism for public evaluation and periodic update
- long term proposal (CD ROMs, AAAI Project Mercury, etc.)
Working group chairs:
Tom Gruber
Knowledge Systems Laboratory
Stanford University
701 Welch Road, Building C
Palo Alto, CA 94304
415/723-3728
gruber@sumex-aim.stanford.edu
Marty Tenenbaum
Center for Integrated Systems
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4070
415/725-3623
marty@cis.stanford.edu
Representation Standards Coordinator:
Bob Neches
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
213/822-1511
neches@isi.edu
Arrangements coordinator:
Kim Chau Luu
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
213/822-1511
luu@isi.edu
Working group mailing list: SRKB@VENERA.ISI.EDU