RE: Re: SEMIS Bulletin

["West, Matthew R SITI-ITABEI" <matthew.west@shell.com>]

Dear Peter,

See comments below.


Matthew West
Streamline Business Information Architect for Supply Chain Management
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eirich, Peter [mailto:Peter.Eirich@jhuapl.edu]
> Sent: 26 May 2004 18:49
> To: 'Burkett, Bill'; cg@CS.UAH.EDU; Pat Hayes; sowa@BESTWEB.NET
> Cc: Frederick Kintanar; standard-upper-ontology@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG;
> cl@philebus.tamu.edu; artem@cs.wayne.edu
> Subject: RE: Re: SEMIS Bulletin
>
>
> I would concur with Bill's comments re: STEP.
>
> (I didn't know that EXPRESS even had the power of an FOL, but
> that is not my
> area so I must defer to John.)

MW: "Simple" data modelling languages have essentially the same power as
Description Logics. However, EXPRESS has a constraint language as well,
and this raises the power to something close to FOL.

MW: I wonder what is meant by "reasoning" - in a general sense it was
never an objective to be able to answer questions, but EXPRESS implementation
environments are expected to be able to check that data conforms to the
constraints that are specified - ans whilst we wouldn't call that reasoning,
but constraint checking - I think it amounts to at least a subset of
reasoning.

MW: But as Bill points out the objective of STEP was exchange of engineering
data, "reasoning" only comes into the equation in as much it helps assure
the quality of the data exchanged.

MW: I will of course mention ISO 18876 and ISO 15926 which have also been
developed in the same community, but are aimed at integration rather than
exchange, and so do tackle the problems around upper ontology as we do here,
but within the EXPRESS environment.
>
> Regards,
> Peter Eirich
> tel:  240-228-7264   (This is a local exchange for DC and
> much of Northern
> VA)
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Burkett, Bill [mailto:WBurkett@modulant.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 1:11 PM
> To: cg@CS.UAH.EDU; Pat Hayes; sowa@BESTWEB.NET
> Cc: Frederick Kintanar; standard-upper-ontology@listserv.ieee.org;
> cl@philebus.tamu.edu; artem@cs.wayne.edu
> Subject: RE: Re: SEMIS Bulletin
>
>
> I'd like to contribute a little background on the subject of STEP and
> EXPRESS and the development goals of these standards to add
> to what John has
> said below:
>
> > The STEP group focused on the much bigger problem of using
> the entire
> > infrastructure (including the web) in order to put semantic modeling
> > at the center of every aspect of the business process, including
> > hardware and software design, development, manufacturing,
> > distribution, and communication with clients and suppliers.  I'll
> > admit that there's more to the elephant, but STEP started with the
> > brain and included a much bigger chunk than just the tail.
>
> I do think that STEP has a long lead in trying to do the
> kinds of things
> that are described as goals of the SW, but it didn't have an "entire
> infrastructure" focus.  The objective of STEP was to define a
> standard data
> format for (initially) exchanging a complete product
> specification between
> hetergeneous CAD/CAM systems (though the objectives have
> grown substantially
> over the years).  Although it had an integrative architecture
> (with respect
> to the data), it was fundamentally source-to-target data
> exchange standard
> (i.e., a "standard vocabulary") and did not include broader network
> architecture concerns.  Except for a few parts of the
> standard (dealing with
> APIs and Java), it was almost exclusively about data.  (STEP
> grew out of
> effort called IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification),
> which was
> designed to exchange computer graphics geometry between
> geometric modelling
> systems.)  The industrial sectors that contributed to STEP
> were principally
> manufacturing concerns and!
>   their technology suppliers (and largely defense-related).
>
> EXPRESS is billed as an "information modelling" language, but
> is basically
> (IMHO) just a data modelling language.  It is a synthesis of
> object and ER
> modelling concepts and does not have any formal logic basis -
> or at least
> that was not a design intent.  That EXPRESS has the power of
> FOL (as John
> observes) I am guessing is a by-product of the ER/relational
> influence on
> the language design.  There are no STEP reasoners in the
> AI/OWL sense that I
> am aware of because the language was not designed for this purpose.
>
> One point I will strongly echo from my STEP experience is
> Pete Kirkham's
> observation: the SW/W3C community has no idea how difficult
> it is to obtain
> agreement on a common understanding of the meaning of
> elements of a data
> standard.
>
> There are others on this list with STEP/EXPRESS backgrounds,
> so I would
> invite them to add to or comment on my assessment here -
> which is purely my
> own view.
>
> For those interested in the STEP information architecture, I
> have an old but
> not completely-outdated paper on the subject at
> http://www.intergate.com/~wcb/ewc.pdf that appeared in
> Engineering With
> Computers in 1995.  (The graphics are bad in this copy,
> though - this was
> done many years ago and I've never updated it with more
> powerful and capable
> technology.)
>
> Bill
>