Monday, April 15, 2013

The AMOR Manifesto

Introduction

Ontologies are becoming increasingly more important in many different domains. However, there are still plenty of barriers to the reuse of ontologies, being the main one the lack of open availability of existing ontologies.

Agreeing on a common set of ontological commitments is costly and all this effort is wasted when others are forced to develop a similar ontology from scratch or to re-engineer an ontology from other available artefacts (documentation, figures, etc.).

The goal for the AMOR Manifesto is to articulate the vision of an ecosystem of Accessible, Machine-readable, Open, and Reusable ontologies that facilitates the reuse of these ontologies or parts of them. To this end, a set of principles have been distilled, based on the 5 star scheme defined for Linked Open Data.

Principles

The ontology is available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence
★★ All the above, plus: available as machine-readable structured data (e.g., CycL instead of image scan of a table)
★★★ All the above, plus: non-proprietary format (e.g., OBO instead of CycL)
★★★★ All the above, plus: use open standards from the W3C (RDF Schema and OWL)
★★★★★ All the above, plus: reuse other people’s ontologies in your ontology

These principles define a set of minimal restrictions to ensure that ontologies are accessible on the web using open standards. It is not in the scope of this Manifesto to impose further quality restrictions on ontologies (e.g., regarding the usability of Linked Data vocabularies).

Invitation

Everyone is invited to support the principles of the AMOR Manifesto and to find new ways to make this vision a reality.

If you support this manifesto and the principles included in it, please leave a comment below.

Friday, February 15, 2013

How to organize a successful VoCamp - Part 5: Potential risks at VoCamps

In the previous posts in this topic, I tried to provide information that can be useful during the process of organizing a VoCamp. In this last part of the series, I will deal with the fact that, in our human nature we are always under the effects of Murphy's law. However, we can still try to avoid as much as possible those things that can go wrong.

Here you have a list of some potential risks to avoid, suggesting possible actions to escape from them. Feel free to add your own.

Low attendance

The VoCamp results do not reflect the consensus of a representative number of people.

Solution:
Improve the dissemination of the VoCamp to attract more participants. If it is too late for doing so, share and discuss the VoCamp results.

Difficulty in travelling to the VoCamp

The chosen location may be far away from people interested in participating or, in these times of economic downturn, people just cannot afford to do so.

Solution:
Organize two simultaneous VoCamps. This will require doubling the organization roles and effort, so don't do it unless it is crucial. Besides, you will require having two parallel agendas with some common sessions (beware of time zones) and videoconference and chat facilities to ensure a fluid interaction.

VoCamp becomes a tutorial/technology show/flyting/<insert here>...

Unless the activity is planned, the risk here is that people does not work in the VoCamp objectives.

Solution:
It will depend on what you want to avoid: ensure that participants satisfy the VoCamp pre-requirements, leave a small slot for people to showcase their work, or don't invite sharp-tongued poets.

Teams do not work as good as they could

Teams are composed by persons and there may be multiple reasons that make a group of persons not to work as a charm.

Solution:
Be careful when defining teams and ensure that everyone understands and follows the rules of the game. Also, be flexible, allow people changing from team to team if they want to do so.

Low participation

The VoCamp is packed to the rafters but no one is opening their mouth.

Solution:
Change! Change the format of the VoCamp, change groups, change collaboration techniques (or come up with a new one), etc. If you are lucky, you still have one more day when you notice this problem.

Lack of continuity

Nothing moves once the VoCamp ends. People does not know if the VoCamp produced some useful outcome or not, or if there are some next steps.

Solution:
Have a clear list of tasks to be performed after the VoCamp and monitor them and their results. Don't disregard the potential commitment of people to these tasks or even their availability to carry them out. Also, support the VoCamp continuity through some initiative (e.g., association, consortium, standardization body) that ensures impulse, monitoring and resource availability.


Apart from these things that could directly affect the VoCamp goals, there are other things that influence the VoCamp as a personal experience and that should not be ignored. Some things can enrich the VoCamp personal experience, such as having free food and drinks or a nice gala dinner. And other things can spoil it, such as bad food, bad weather, or lack of Wi-Fi.

Finally, if you have withstood the five-part series on organizing a VoCamp, I would like to know your sincere opinion about it.

Please comment! 

 How to organize a successful VoCamp:

How to organize a successful VoCamp - Part 4: After the VoCamp

In this post we continue with one of the main messages of the last post: The VoCamp does not end with the VoCamp!

After having a good time, and once you thought everything had finished, there are still some things to do.

Review and complete results

Maybe in the VoCamp only a conceptualization was drafted on board and now you want to implement it as a ready-to-be-used ontology. Or you already implemented an ontology full of ontological commitments but you still have to improve its documentation.

In any case, review what you did. Don't trust what was done while ten people were talking at the same time in a room.

Document and disseminate results

I already mentioned properly documenting your ontology, either if you have implemented it or if you have just some drawings or photos. Other interesting things to document are the discussions or the rationale that led to taking some decisions instead of others; these can be collected in minutes. And don't forget to take note of those things about the VoCamp process itself that may help you or others in the future such as lessons learnt, best (and wrong) practices, etc.

Once you have finished, don't keep all that information for yourself! The VoCamp web page is the best place to publish this information or to provide links to where the information can be obtained.

Discuss results

Even if you have gathered the most brilliant minds in the area, inevitably they are not representative for the whole community around a topic. Therefore, try to discuss your results with others or to present them to other audiences. Surely you will gather some good feedback!

 How to organize a successful VoCamp:

Friday, January 25, 2013

How to organize a successful VoCamp - Part 3: At the VoCamp

The VoCamp day has come. By now, you should have some things clear for the next couple of days (which is the common duration of a VoCamp, since a one-day event can be too short).
And the most important thing that you must have clear is the goal of your VoCamp, because this goal is what should guide the whole event.

Having concrete goals and restricting the scope of the VoCamp is advisable in order to ensure that you will obtain the results that you want. This usually leads to cover a single domain (or subdomain) or a set of tightly-related domains. You can always organize a multi-domain VoCamp, dealing with several unrelated domains, but in this case interactions between participants can decrease ("Do you think that I can apply your protozoa digestion concepts to my ontology for kernel modules in operating systems?").

As a handy reference, here you have a checklist of the inputs and outputs of a VoCamp.
Inputs:
  • VoCamp goals
  • Domains covered
  • Reading list
  • Participant list
Outputs:
  • Models
  • Pictures (e.g., of sticky notes or boards)
  • Next steps
Take care not to disregard this last output. The VoCamp does not end with the VoCamp!

The VoCamp outcome

The added value of gathering people together in a VoCamp is the possibility of discussion and consensus-reaching.

Therefore, if your expected outcome is to develop a new ontology, take advantage of this added value and focus on activities such as specification or conceptualization, instead of trying to produce an OWL implementation.

Of course, you can have other outcomes in mind. In any case, prefer tasks that demand human interaction and leave other mechanical/technical tasks for another time.

Potential VoCamp outcomes:
  • Develop a new ontology
  • Analyse other ontologies/models
  • Specify ontology requirements (e.g., competency questions)
  • Extend an existing ontology
  • Define mappings between ontologies
  • Identify ontology design patterns
  • Evaluate or debug ontologies
  • Implement an ontology (yes, even this is a valid outcome)
  • Any other outcome that you can think of

Grouping participants

It may happen that you need to split participants into different groups. This may be required in circumstances such as when multiple domains (or subdomains) are being covered in the VoCamp, or when there are plenty of participants and certain tasks (e.g., discussion or consensus reaching) are not efficient. In this second case, avoid working in parallel unless you have a significant number of participants.

If you make groups, you will need group leaders, who will be in charge of leading the tasks to be performed in the group and taking them to a good end.

And if you expect having groups, it is better to identify in advance group leaders (as another input for the VoCamp). Try to find people with a motivation for leading the group (e.g., the creator of the ontology to be extended in the group).

VoCamp schedule

Which is the best way of reaching the VoCamp goals in a limited period of time? This is something yet to analyse; however, there are different sessions that should be part of your VoCamp schedule:
  • Participant presentation (including related work and interest in the VoCamp)
  • What is a VoCamp (how does it work and what is expected from participants)
  • VoCamp goals and scope
  • Working sessions (see next section)
  • Outcomes presentation
  • Discussion
If you plan to have different groups working in parallel, you will need to add sessions for
  • Group creation
  • Findings sharing
And don't forget about other types of sessions that do not directly lead to the VoCamp outcome but strongly support it, such as
  • Free time slots, so people can open their laptops and make things unrelated to the VoCamp (such as reading email) instead of doing them during the rest of the sessions. 
  • Breaks, for networking, informal discussions, resting, etc. 
  • Lunches and dinner, for more networking, having fun, drink some beers, etc.
Finally, there are certain sessions that are not recommended based on previous experiences; these are tutorial sessions, that is, those sessions where someone spends a significant amount of time presenting or educating the rest of the participants in a certain topic. This type of sessions should be kept to a minimum, since the important ones are working sessions that really take advantage of gathering people together.

Working sessions

Working sessions are the most important part of the VoCamp. However, there is not many information on how to carry them out successfully. While keeping the notion of an informal event, the rules of the game (e.g., participant roles, collaboration techniques) should be defined and clear for participants.

Make some research and find those collaboration techniques that are more suited to your task at hand and to your audience. Don't worry about making things more structured, but don't forget letting people have fun!

Different techniques will require different tools.  However, prefer non-digital tools (e.g., pens, boards, flip-chart pads, sticky notes, etc.) over digital ones (e.g., ontology editor, wiki, document processor).

Ask people to let their laptops closed (and their phones in the pocket (and their tablets in their cases (and ...)) to avoid distractions. The schedule already contains different free time slots, so sooner or later they can go back to their cyber-lifes.

 How to organize a successful VoCamp: