Progress Report

· We are currently (and slowly) reformatting pages in a move from the 'old' WSU WAVE server to the ontologos site. We will eventually have all of the WAVE, OML, CKML, ontologies and bioinformatics pages active. The main OML/CKML application that we had developed during the WAVE project was a 'conceptual browser'.

· There is some discussion on the relationships between OML/CKML and RDF/S on the one hand and OML/CKML and XOL on the other hand in a paper of last fall presented at the KAW'99 conference. "CKML: The Central Core" [http://sern.ucalgary.ca/KSI/KAW/KAW99/papers/Kent1/CKML.pdf]; see also the accompanying PowerPoint slides [http://sern.ucalgary.ca/KSI/KAW/KAW99/papers/Kent1/CKML.ppt].

· There is a theoretical (but hopefully intuitive) discussion of ontology sharing in the paper "The Information Flow Foundation for Conceptual Knowledge Organization" located at [Papers/ISKO6/ISKO6.PDF]. To appear in the Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the International Society for Knowledge Organization [http://www.ceit.sk/wwwisis/isko.htm].

· The Ontology Interchange Language (OIL) [http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/oilhome.shtml] is, to a certain extent, a reaction that the Description Logic point-of-view has not been represented in ontology interchange languages. OIL is based upon the XML-based Ontology-exchange Language (XOL) [http://www.ai.sri.com/pkarp/xol/] of Peter Karp. There is a paper on "Information Flow Languages" that includes a formal, axiomatic definition of ontologies, and gives a completely clear presentation for the incorporation of the terminological representations (Booleans, role quantification, feature selection and agreement, etc.) of DL into Information Flow.

· A new markup language called the Information Flow Framework (IFF) is being designed. It is founded upon the principles and techniques of Information Flow and Formal Concept Analysis, which incorporates aspects (classification, theories, logics, terminologies) from OML/CKML, OIL and RDF/S. The restriction of terminology specifications from first order ontological languages to description logics is included in IFF.

Please send questions, comments and suggestions about this page to: Robert E. Kent rekent@ontologos.org