Thank you for your update on Ontology Standards Development in Europe. I
recognize that most members/observers are focused on the rigorous technical
details of ontological standards. Yet, if the scope of this group and the
European standards group encompasses the ongoing acquisition of commercial
business needs and evolving requirements of companies engaged in Internet
commerce, then there may be some opportunity for us to work together.
As the Executive Director of CommerceNet's Information Access Research
Portfolio, I am tasked with managing catalog interoperability and commercial
product taxonomy/ontology pilot projects for our members. We are currently
defining a requirements document for an interoperable catalog interface
protocol (including directories, agents and search engines). At the core of
these efforts is the recognition that standard product description
ontologies is critical to useful and effective catalog data
exchange/interoperation. However, by the very nature of CommerceNet's role,
these projects are more focused on the near term application of new and
emerging standards for use by companies doing commerce on the Internet.
We would be interested in participating on behalf of our US members in any
US based workshop. Since we have some very active CommerceNet Global
Partner organizations in Europe, we may also be able to gain support from
our members for such an Ontology workshop in Europe as well.
If it is appropriate to the scope of these planned workshops, we could
possibly make a presentation, conduct a panel discussion or hold a workshop
on the requirements and needs for ontology standards as they affect
web-based product catalogs and catalog interoperability.
Please let me know if such participation is useful and appropriate.
Respectfully yours,
Patrick Gannon
Executive Director, Information Access Portfolio
CommerceNet
http://www.commerce.net
702-831-2251 702-831-3925 (Fax)
865 Tahoe Blvd., Suite 211, Incline Village, NV 89451
President & C.E.O.
Internet Shopping Directory, Inc.
http://www.shoppingdirect.com
At 06:08 PM 7/14/97 -0700, Eduard Hovy wrote:
>
>Dear Members and Observers of NCITS T2:
>
>At the Assoc for Computational Linguistics conference last week in Madrid
>(you thought NATO was the only thing happening there then? No indeed --
>Madrid is a very vibrant kind of place!) I attended a workshop on Ontologies,
>and described our plans wrt an Ontology Standard.
>
>This raised considerable interest. The most concrete was from the reviewer of
>the EAGLES and related efforts, an EC-funded multinational project to create
>the standards in which a future ontology can be placed. Groups in Sheffield,
>Pisa, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and more recently also in Germany and France have
>been funded to:
>- create WordNets of Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, German
>- create a specification of the structure and content of a standard ontology.
>
>I am in the process of exchanging letters of cooperation with this reviewer,
>Prof. Antonio Zampolli of the University of Pisa (a rather senior person in
>Computational Linguistics and Lexical Databases). He and the EC funding
>agent, Mr. Nino Cencioni of Brussels, will visit the NSF in October to
>discuss possible international collaboration and to try to drum up some
>funding to hold two workshops, one in Europe and one here, on these matters.
>
>With the blessing of the Ontology Group I will be happy to join their meeting
>and try to describe our goals and work. (I am also doing so at a meeting in
>Washington at NIST later this month.)
>
>Your comments appreciated.
>E
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Eduard Hovy
>email: hovy@isi.edu USC Information Sciences Institute
>tel: 310-822-1511 ext 731 4676 Admiralty Way
>fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
>project homepage: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html
>
>
>
>
Patrick Gannon
Executive Director, Information Access Portfolio
CommerceNet
http://www.commerce.net
702-831-2251 702-831-3925 (Fax)
865 Tahoe Blvd., Suite 211, Incline Village, NV 89451
President & C.E.O.
Internet Shopping Directory, Inc.
http://www.shoppingdirect.com