Report of April X3L8 Special Interest Group Meeting
Meeting Report
L8 Special Interest Group
Held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
April 10 & 11, 1997
Attendees:
Brent Archinal, U.S. Naval Observatory
Bruce Bargmeyer, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Larry Fitzwater, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Dan Gillman, Bureau of the Census
Alan Goldfine, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Henry Heffernan, EDPNS
Lori Hentz, Internal Revenue Service
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina
William Kenworthey, Jr., Self
Douglas Mann, Battelle
John McCarthy, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Jill Miller, Internal Revenue Service
Judith Newton, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Phong Ngo, Science Applications International Corporation
Burton Parker, Paladin Integration Engineering
Andy Schoka, Mitretek Systems
Dan Gillman chaired the meeting. The following reports the issues raised and decisions made:
The public review period has ended for this standard. One comment was received. Burt Parker circulated a draft response by email. In this meeting, he led a discussion to finalize the response. We made some revisions to the draft text. Burt will prepare a final version and send it out. The person originally making the comment has 20 days to respond. Concurrently, Burt will forward to Phong the final text of the standard. Phong will send it out for X3L8 ballot. Upon approval, Phong will forward the date standard to ANSI for publishing.
Phong Ngo reported on the status of several JTC1 actions. He has sent out ballots and requests speedy responses from X3L8 members.
The SC14 New Work Items are currently out for ballot. Judy Newton has sent out email and FAXes to countries, encouraging them to indicate that they will actively participate in the work. She will also make telephone contact to be sure that at least five countries will actively participate.
Burt Parker reviewed the status of the current draft of this standard. All committee comments have been incorporated. Burt requested the committee's guidance on whether to include two informative annexes: one explaining the term Designated Civil Time, the other providing organizational names and addresses where UTC time, US Time Zones, and leap seconds can be obtained. The committee resolved that these annexes should be added. Burt will finalize the draft standard, including the two new informative annexes. Burt will forward the draft to Phong, who will send it out for X3L8 ballot.
Doug Mann reported that he presented an introduction of L8 to the ANSI HISB meeting on March 27,1997. HISB is ANSI's coordinating board of healthcare standards development organizations. HISB includes SDOs such as HL7 (clinical), MD156 (dental), NCPDP (pharmacy), X12N (insurance), and ASTM. They are all interested in developing a dictionary of their data elements. There is a pressure from a law for Dept of Health and Human Services to specify standards for healthcare data interchange. The L8 work was unknown to HISB members. The Mayo clinic expressed an interest in getting additional members for L8.
Doug Mann discussed the possibility of having a joint meeting between X3L8 and X3T2. A proposed time for a joint meeting is August 14 & 15 in Seattle. We need to see who could attend at that place and time.
The members of X3L8 accept with extreme regret the resignation of Mr. Paul Hawes as the Chief Architect of the Metamodel for the Management of Sharable Data. He is recognized by all members as the paramount, dynamic force that propelled the Metamodel to its present level of refinement, which has gained wide recognition as an immeasurable advancement in semantic structuring as a foundation for knowledge utilization. We wish to express our deep appreciation for his contribution to the work of the committee and wish him well in his new job.
Doug Mann received from Paul Hawes the material documenting the current version of the metamodel. Doug is translating the material into a form editable with the software packages that Doug has available. He has recreated the graphic for the metamodel, using PowerPoint. In so doing, he raised a number of issues to be resolved. He is also translating the text and graphics of the public review document. Doug invites comments from the X3L8 members as input to his effort to prepare this material for the second public review. Doug passed out copies of his new material and is putting his versions up on the X3L8 FTP server.
Henry Heffernan agreed to develop some introductory material for the Metamodel for the Management of Sharable data. This introductory material will provide some historical context and help people to understand the usefulness of the metamodel. Andy Schoka and Burt Parker will provide Henry some potentially useful material.
Doug Mann will prepare MSWord, HTML, and PDF versions of the April 1st version of the draft Metamodel for the Management of Sharable Data. He will put these versions and the PowerPoint version of the metamodel graphic on the FTP server. He will then send a message to Frank Olken requesting that it be put up on the Web page to facilitate its use in the JTC1SC14 Workshop on Metadata Registration.
Andy Schoka described the potential use of the SC14 and X3L8 standards for Intelligent Transportation Systems, which is Schoka Department of Transportation initiative. At their last meeting, TC204 made a number of resolutions and action items relating to the use of the X3L8 and SC14 standards. Andy will send out the resolutions on the SC14-News email reflector. DOT is working with standards development organizations such as the IEEE to standardize key aspects of this work. The IEEE efforts are drawing heavily on the SC14 and X3L8 work. We believe that there is much to be accomplished by collaboration between X3L8 and the Intelligent Transportation Systems effort.
John McCarthy gave an update on arrangements for the workshop. A meeting of the program committee will be held on April 14, 1997. The committee will complete organizational items about the content and organization of the workshop.
Judy Newton said that Tom Kurihara is proposing to organize a workshop to discuss the components and other aspects of Ontology development. He is considering the potential dates of July 23-24 or July 29-30, 1997 at NIST.
We discussed areas that we may not have adequately addressed in the work to date on the metamodel. These include:
o Metamodel extensions for application data elements
Bill Kenworthey has long talked about "attribute steaming" -- the addition of attributes as we go through progressive steps from design of a "generic" or "abstract" data element to design of a data element actually used in a particular application. At the abstract level, a data element could be used in many applications and is documented with a set of attributes. For a data element is used in an application, we can specify additional attributes describing, for example, how and for what purpose the application collects values for the data element. We have not have not specified the additional attributes in the current metamodel. Now that we have reference implementations of the metamodel in place, we may be in a better position to address this topic.
o Electronic data communication
Data elements can be combined into messages. The structure of the message may be recorded for any message, including EDI X.12 transaction sets and UN/EDIFACT message sets. This could also include new structures that may be designed for Web communications. We may need additional structures in the metamodel to capture this information or to adequately describe the data elements used in messages. Prototype work is underway to accommodate this type of data.
o Managing domains
In some cases there are value and/or conceptual domains that are the focus of maintenance efforts. For example, country, state, and county names/codes. If we focus our attention on this aspect (managing domains), we may want to revise some aspect of the metamodel. For other data, the focus may be much more on management of the "concept" and less focused on the domain.
o Capturing different classification systems
We need to explore the use of our classification structures for capturing different types of classification structures. If ERDs can be considered as a type of classification structure, it should be possible to capture this model information about any data element. Alternatively, some taxonomies or ontologies might "classify" the data element quite differently. This could resolve different views of what information is contained in the Object Class, Property and Representation attributes of the current metamodel.
Topics to be explored at the next two meetings:
We will explore these two topics at the May and June SIG meetings. In October, we would like to invite outside participants to contribute to the review and discussion. Judy Newton will help to organize the October meeting.
8. Date standard, X3.30:
Phong Ngo reported that the public review period for the standard has ended. No comments were received. The next step is to receive the pre-edited version from ANSI. L8 is to review this and prepare a final version. Then X3L8 votes (letter/email) to send it to the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS, formerly X3), which conducts a six-week ballot. Upon approval, NCITS sends it to ANSI for publication.
X3L8 SIG meeting 9AM, April 10 & 11, 1997 at NIST Administration Building, Lecture Room C
X3L8 SIG meeting 9 AM, May 22 & 23, 1997 at NIST Administration Building, Lecture room F
X3L8 SIG meeting 9 AM, September 25 & 26, 1997 at NIST, Administration Building, Lecture room C
X3L8 SIG and Plenary meetings 9 AM, October 22-24, 1997, Battelle
X3L8 SIG and Plenary meetings, February 2-18-20, 1988 at ITI
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X3L8 documents, including this meeting report, are available via Anonymous FTP from speckle.ncsl.nist.gov. Log in as anonymous, use your email address for a password, Change directory to X3L8 (X3L8 in lowercase letters) and check the "readme" file for details. Many of the documents are also listed on the X3L8 Home Page http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/X3L8