Report of Meeting L8 SIG Project on
Terminology extensions for ISO/IEC 11179
Held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
November 19, 1998, 9AM - 5 PM
Participants:
Bruce Bargmeyer Environmental Protection Agency
Jim Carpenter Bureau of Labor Statistics
Patrick Cassidy MICRA, Inc.
Murray Freeman FOSI Ltd.
Dan Gillman Bureau of the Census
Judy Griffin HAZMED
Beverly Hacker Environmental Protection Agency
Henry Heffernan National Institutes of Health
Tom Kurihara National Institute of Standards and Technology
William H. Kenworthey, Jr. Self
Ky Ostergaard Science Applications International Corporation
Tony Sarris Unisys
John Sowa Concept Technology
The meeting was led by Bruce Bargmeyer.
The following is a report of topics discussed and agreements made.
Documents about this project, including the documents resulting from the topics discussed at this meeting are available at:
http://sdct-sunsrv1.ncsl.nist.gov/~ftp/l8/sc32wg2/projects/11179term/term-home.htm
Documents at the website include the NWI proposal and an attachment to the NWI proposal and a Work Plan with assignments for this project.
There was extensive discussion of the intended scope for this project.
The project will focus on extending the 11179 to better accommodate semantic management of concepts and the terms by which concepts are referenced. An important foundation for semantics management is the ability to specify concepts and to associate the each concept with the linguistic expressions (terms or unintelligent identifiers) used to name or reference the concept. Concepts may be expressed as definitions and each linguistic expression (term, identifier) for the each concept should be in a context. For example, the context for a term may be a specific language (French, English, …) or a specific scientific discipline (chemistry, materials engineering, …). Once concepts and terms are specified, they may be organized a variety of structured sets such as controlled vocabularies, keywords, data element values, data element components, thesauri, themes, topic trees, taxonomies, or ontologies. Each of these structured sets of concepts/terminology can be deployed in various technologies. For example, topic trees and thesauri can be deployed in search engines to facilitate discovery of relevant documents and data, ontologies can be deployed in intelligent information services (request brokers, query agents, resource agents, etc.), and data elements can be deployed in DBMS technology. Extensions to 11179 are required to establish a means for specifying concepts and terms and to establish a means for organizing concepts/terminology into structured sets. Reference implementations will be used to demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed standards and technology.
At the October SIG meeting, Bruce Bargmeyer was requested to produce a "framework" document. He developed a presentation and placed it on the project website to be used as a draft of material that can be refined into a terminology framework. See the project website, above. The group reviewed the presentation and made many comments.
The group reviewed the draft work plan. The tasks were organized into a logical order (from the previous "brainstorm" order) and assignments were reviewed and modified. See the project website, above.
The group discussed the Terminology panel scheduled as part of the upcoming Open Forum on Metadata Registries, February 16-19, 1999. We identified potential speakers.
Several participants contributed documents and suggestions of standards that are relevant to this topic. Where possible, machine-readable versions will be placed on the website.