2007 Q4 Report Identity Schemas

This is the first report to Identity Commons on activities in this group. Joaquin Miller has stepped down as the Stewards Council rep, so Paul Trevithick (alternate) has written this report in his stead and until a new rep is appointed.

Successes

 * Community Dictionary Service (http://cds.idschemas.idcommons.net/) prototype was demonstrated (thank you Markus and Drummond). This could be enabling technology for this WG's "catalogue"
 * James Schoening, having heard about Identity Schemas (ISWG) as well as the Higgins project's ontology efforts, assembled a group of ontology experts interested in contributing to the ISWG. A separate mailing list (http://idcommons.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/person-ontology) was established, and there was some lively discussion. Thanks for doing this James.
 * Much of the discussion centered on what ontology language to use. As an outcome, this knowledge representation comparison page was created http://krl.a.wiki-site.com/index.php/Main_Page. The general consensus among this sub-community is that OWL is too weak a language for the purpose at hand, and that one based on first order logic is required.
 * HOWL (Higgins base ontology in OWL) was hotly discussed. The general conclusion was that HOWL should use RDF reification (and thus relax to OWL-Full instead of OWL-DL) instead of the awkward home-made solution to reification. [Update: the Higgins team is working on an update to HOWL that incorporates this feedback. It should be released in the next few weeks]

Breakdowns

 * The discussion on the new list wound down without any "next steps"
 * The Higgins team members (notably Paul) have not (due to getting Higgins 1.0 out the door) been able in Q4 to give the discussion much attention. Situation will improve in 2008

Requests
Little requests Big requests
 * 1) Need a member of this WG (who is not already an IC Steward) to volunteer to be the Steward Council rep
 * 2) Need help copying/transcoding content of the wiki here http://identityschemas.org (old MoinMoin wiki) to here: Identity Schemas (see the red links--they point back to the old wiki).
 * 1) Need volunteers to work on the Community Dictionary Service technology
 * 2) Need ontology contributions to populate the CDS

Announcements

 * Administrivia:
 * Joaquin Miller announced that for conflict-of-interest reasons he could no longer represent this WG at the IC Stewards Council.
 * Paul cannot be the rep because according to IC rules you cannot represent N>1 WGs (Paul is rep for the Identity Gang)