A single UML diagram showing all identified requirements. Ref "Re quirements for a Web Ontology Language", W3C Working Draft 07 March 2002 (original) (raw)

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While reviewing (http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-webont-req-20020307/), I felt it beneficial to create a single UML diagram identifying all of the requirements described so far in the working draft. As such I offer the attachment, which is in 'PNG' format for use by the community. The diagram has three foci:

Design Goals and the constituent 8 general requirements
Requirements of section 4 which are deemed essential
and Objectives which are deemed useful but may or may not be addressed by the working group.

After considering all of the requirements, it appears that 'trust' is only slightly covered as a requirement, and only indirectly at that. The requirements that seem to relate to trust are:

Ontology metadata -potentially allowing attached information with an ontology to provide useful information about the trust
Integration of digital signatures - potentially supporting authentication?

After briefly reviewing P3P, it appears that a similar concept could be used to share information about trust aspects of an ontology, I am not even sure what these trust aspects are at this time, but I suspect it is worthwhile to think about them at this initial requirements stage. It might be useful when creating an ontology that relies on other ontologies to be able to set some preferences about the trust levels desired with respect to shared ontologies.

Some trust properties might include:

reference to trusted third party for ontology integrity
responsible party identification for ontology authentication
commitment level to maintaining ontology integrity
standard or consortium references for ontology
signatures for ensuring ontology integrity (Already covered in "Integration of digital signatures")
Trust Level - an overall indicator

Best Regards, John Yanosy, Fellow of the technical staff, Motorola Labs jyanosy@motorola.com