1. Why Can’t We All Just Agree? Dave McComb August 11, 2010 Federal Data Architecture Subcommittee Semantic Arts

2. Your Current Situation Each of your agencies has evolved, over long periods of time, complex systems (Greatly Simplified) In aggregate each agency has at least tens of thousands, and mostly hundreds of thousands and some of you may have millions, of distinctions coded into those systems And, you’ve been asked to “interoperate” Each agency already relies on more distinctions than anyone could possibly understand

4. Time Place Landmark Person/UniqueIte m Substance Organization Documents Agreements Behavior Intention Magnitude UnitOfMeasure Collections Concepts A Semantic Intermediary

5. Desirable Attributes of a Semantic Intermediary Simplicity Coverage Unambiguous Specificity Modular Fractal

6. A candidate that meets these criteria And is free As in free speech And free beer Available under Creative Commons License At no charge gist.owl

7. Time Place Landmark Person/UniqueItem Substance Organization Documents Agreements Behavior Intention Magnitude UnitOfMeasure Collections Simplicity (130 classes in 14 groups) Concepts

8. (Subject exclusively possesses Object ) [Person1 hasMagnitude Weight100] (Mereology) [CarA hasDirectPart EngineB] (Spatial Relations) [FortCollins geoContains MyHouse] (Teleology) [Dave produce Presentation2] (About or descriptive) [ThisBook about Lincoln] (GenericAssociations) [Message1 fromAgent Dave] 132 Properties in six families

9. Coverage

11. An Enterprise Ontology we built recently contained 600 classes All but 2 were derived from or defined in terms of gist

12. Unambiguous Almost all these high level concepts are disjoint Which means classes derived from them also cannot have overlapping/ ambiguous membership This helps ontologists make some difficult but necessary decisions as they map their domain into the common

13. Unambiguous Account BankAccountGLAccount ?

14. Specific gist itself and the classes derived from it have rigorous definitions

15. Modular (Each ontology is “human scale” ) gist Gist2/3 SM R&DFEI Div1Div2

16. Fractal (as you “zoom in” more detail is revealed) Time Place Landmark Person/UniqueItem Substance Organization Documents Agreements Behavior Intention Magnitude UnitOfMeasure Collections Concepts

17. Fractal (as you “zoom in” more detail is revealed)

19. Time Place Landmark Person/UniqueItem Substance Organization Documents Agreements Behavior Intention Magnitude UnitOfMeasure Collections Cooks Tour Concepts

20. ‘avago

22. Your examples

23. Summary Semantic Integration is going to be greatly aided by having an intermediary that is: – Simple, to promote adoption – Broad enough to cover most of the concepts – Unambiguous to prevent promoting vagueness – Rigorous in its specification – Modular to allow mix and match – Fractal to allow people to understand it by degree www.semanticarts.com/gist ontologies.semanticarts.com/gist/gist.owl Documentation Ontology

24. Semantic Arts Clients

25. Semantic Arts Scope of Work We work with large organizations To help them reduce complexity and remove costs from their enterprise applications and architecture We specialize in: – Enterprise Architecture and SOA – Application of Semantic Technology – Building Enterprise Ontologies – Semantic MDM

26. Contact Dave McComb mccomb@semanticarts.com (970) 490-2224 www.semanticarts.com Twitter @semanticarts