To OASIS Members:
A draft TC charter has been submitted to establish the OASIS Semantic
Mapping of XML (MOX) Technical Committee (below). In accordance with the
OASIS TC Process Policy section 2.2:
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process-2008-06-19.php#formation) the
proposed charter is hereby submitted for comment. The comment period shall
remain open until 11:45 pm ET on 22 September 2008.
OASIS maintains a mailing list for the purpose of submitting comments on
proposed charters. Any OASIS member may post to this list by sending email
to:
mailto:oasis-charter-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org. All messages will be
publicly archived at:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oasis-charter-discuss/. Members who
wish to receive emails must join the group by selecting "join group" on the
group home page:
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Employees of organizational members do not require primary representative
approval to subscribe to the oasis-charter-discuss e-mail.
A telephone conference will be held among the Convener, the OASIS TC
Administrator, and those proposers who wish to attend within four days of
the close of the comment period. The announcement and call-in information
will be noted on the OASIS Charter Discuss Group Calendar.
We encourage member comment and ask that you note the name of the proposed
TC ([MOX]) in the subject line of your email message.
Regards,
Mary
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Mary P McRae
Director, Technical Committee Administration
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
email: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org
web: www.oasis-open.org
phone: 1.603.232.9090
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PROPOSED CHARTER FOR REVIEW AND COMMENT
OASIS Semantic Mapping of XML (MOX) Technical Committee
1) The Charter of the TC, which includes only the following items:
(1)(a) The name of the TC
OASIS Semantic mapping of XML (MOX) Technical Committee
(1)(b) A statement of purpose, including a definition of the problem to be
solved.
The ability to discover and compose services based on semantic analysis or
mapping is needed in many industries such as Telecom and e-Health. In the
Telecom industry, having the ability to discover and compose services based
on those services' semantics is needed to enable Telecom providers to
guarantee Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As such, there is a need to
derive ontologies from the service WSDL file to describe the service
functionality/behavior within domains.
The composition of web services is achieved by creating a third web service
(hereafter referred to as the integrating web service) and its Web Service
Description Language (WSDL) file. This web service invokes the source legacy
Web service to retrieve data, mediates to resolve any mismatches the data
has with the destination web service, typically through invocation of common
services, and then passes the converted data to this destination Web
service. The mediation step can take various forms including an XSL
transformation. Typically the XSL is generated at design time by either a
programmer or by a data expert using an editor that permits the matching of
entities in different schemas by drawing lines between schemas entities.
Currently in data management tools, the matched entities correspond to
logical constraints on the schemas (e.g. XQuery, XSL, SQL), making them
difficult to exchange across systems.
Semantic mediation and Semantic Web Service approaches require the use of
aligned ontologies and XSL to achieve mediation in semantic composition of
Web services. Thus, enabling the semantic composition of Web services
requires the generation of XSL, mediating schema, aligned ontologies, and
possibly other artifacts. Currently, each of the artifacts mentioned above
requires a different process for its creation. The issues with the current
approach of service composition become more obvious when you consider that
the integrated service will be integrated with other web services. For
example, how do you reuse the artifacts that were created for the
integrating web service when it needs to be composed with another web
service?
In this work, the TC will investigate the use of mapping relations which
result in the generation of the artifacts needed for service composition and
reuse. That is, by capturing the mappings of XML Schemas entities in XML or
HTML, a user agent can generate the mediating schema, the XSL, and the
aligned ontologies needed to semantically compose web services. This way, a
single process can be used to generate the mappings between schemas, which
result in the generation of XSL, mediating schemas, and aligned ontologies.
Furthermore, the mapped entities can be exchanged between different
platforms by simply copying them. Consequently, mapping relations enable
reuse in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
As such, the objective of the working group is to specify a standard for
mappings between XML schemas using mapping relations. We refer to a file
that is compliant with the standard specification as a MOX file. The TC
accepts as its starting point the mapping relations as described in the Web
of Mashup and Metadata Scripting Language (WMSL) [6,7]. Other contributions
will be accepted for consideration without any prejudice or restrictions and
evaluated based on technical merit insofar as they conform to this charter.
OASIS members with extensive experience and knowledge in these areas are
particularly invited to participate. WMSL provides an effective means to
enable the Mashup of web services while specifying data semantics. WMSL is
simply a web page or an XML page that specifies the import of schemas and
mappings between schemas using mapping relations. Examples of mapping
relations include: equivalentClass, sameAs, subClassOf, hasMatch,
hasContext, and hasRelation. Once a MOX is captured, then a user agent can
accomplish the automated transformation between the mapped XML schemas, the
automated generation of a mediation schema model, or the mediation ontology
that mediates between the mapped XML schemas.
(1)(c) The scope of the work of the TC.
First, the TC will focus on analyzing a subset of the tools currently in use
in SOA for the purpose of determining the artifacts that the current tools
generate from schema mappings. It is expected that these tools generate one
of the following: XSL, OWL, XQEURY or SQL. Next, the technical committee
will provide a classification of the types of data mediation provided by
current tool vendors. Then, the technical committee will specify the mapping
relations that guarantee automated translations between XML schemas, and the
generation of the mediation schema. The TC accepts as its starting point the
mapping relations as described in the Web of Mashup and Metadata Scripting
Language. Other contributions will be accepted for consideration without any
prejudice or restrictions and evaluated based on technical merit insofar as
they conform to this charter. OASIS members with extensive experience and
knowledge in these areas are particularly invited to participate.
Specifically, the TC will do the following:
1. Conduct a survey of existing tools and methodologies that are used to
achieve semantic mappings between schemas.
2. Define formal operations of mapping relations on XML schemas to specify
the generation of the mediating schema from the mapping relations
3. Define formal operations of mapping relations on XML instances to
specify the automated translation of xml instances
4. Define formal operations of mapping relations on RDF ontologies to
specify the definition of the mapping relations in OWL
5. Specify mapping rules between XML schema primitives [3] and OWL/RDF
[4,5] primitives for the purpose of generating aligned ontology from mapped
schemas
6. Specify a uniform approach for identifying and accessing entities in
schemas, including xml schema, RDF and OWL schemas [1,2]
7. Consider the suitability of the developed techniques to address Telecom
use cases from the Telecom Member section TC and also the applicability of
the developed technologies to other uses cases from the health industry.
Out of Scope
The mediation functionality which cannot be achieved from mapping relations
is considered out of scope. For example, query rewriting using mapping
relations is out of scope. Furthermore, although the proposed standard may
work for not only XML Schemas and XML instances, but also for ontologies,
the TC may choose to address the mappings of XML Schemas and XML instances
first, and then ensures that the methodology is also applicable on RDF\OWL
files second.
(1)(d) A list of deliverables, with projected completion dates.
1. A survey of existing tools and the artifacts they produced in achieving
data mediation. The document will also contain a classification of the types
of data mediation; March 2009.
2. A specification containing the definitions of the mapping relations
using XML Schema resulting in the generation of the mediating schema.
3. A specification of the operation of the mapping relations on XML
instances.
4. A specification of the mapping relations in OWL/RDF, and a
specification of the mapping rules between XML schema primitives [3] and
OWL/RDF [4,5] primitives
5. A specification for identifying and accessing entities in XML Schemas
and XML instances
6. A MOX specification containing the encoding of the mapping relations in
HTML and XML.
A single MOX file permits a user agent the generation of XSL, the generation
of the mediating schema, and the generation of the aligned ontologies. That
is, given a MOX file, a user agent can generate the XSL by following the
rules specified in bullet number three above, or generate the mediating
schema by following the rules specified in bullet number two above, or
generate the aligned ontologies by following the rules specified in bullet
number four above. Thus all of the identified artifacts associated with
service composition are generated from a single MOX file.
In developing specifications 2,3,4,5 and 6 the TC will develop a Test Plan,
Test Cases and Scenarios, for each normative specification. The Test plan
shall include means for ensuring that compliant implementations are
interoperable.
The TC will closely coordinate with other TCs, particularly with those in
the Telecom Member Section to ensure that related specifications are
consistent and can be used with each other.
(1)(e) Specification of the IPR Mode under which the TC will operate.
The TC shall operate under: RAND
(1)(f) The anticipated audience or users of the work.
It is anticipated that SOA vendors will implement the specifications
produced by the TC.
(1)(g) The language in which the TC shall conduct business.
This TC will use English as the language for conducting its
operations.
(2) Non-normative information regarding the startup of the TC:
(2)(a) Identification of similar or applicable work that is being done in
other OASIS TCs or by other organizations, so as to address these issues:
why there is a need for another effort in this area and how this proposed TC
will be different, and what level of liaison will be pursued with these
other organizations.
The TC will be performing new work items that are currently not covered by
any other OASIS TCs.
The TC co-chairs will coordinate closely with other bodies in order to
inform them about the progress of the work and also in order to count on
their expertise in the development of the work. The chairs will also
continually monitor any new work that models XML schema as graphs, and may
leverage existing standards, such as XPATH [1] or Schema Component
Designator [2], where appropriate. The TC will also be making extensive use
of XML Schemas and RDF/OWL.
As of this date, there is no other working group whose work overlaps with
the work of this TC.
(2)(b) The date, time, and location of the first meeting, whether it will be
held in person or by phone, and who will sponsor this first meeting. The
first meeting of a TC shall occur no less than 30 days after the
announcement of its formation in the case of a telephone or other electronic
meeting, and no less than 45 days after the announcement of its formation in
the case of a face-to-face meeting.
The first meeting of this TC will be a face-to-face meeting to be held on
Tuesday December 2nd, at Mitre Corporation, 202 Burlington Rd, Bedford, MA,
01730, USA.
(2)(c) The projected on-going meeting schedule for the year following the
formation of the TC, or until the projected date of the final deliverable,
whichever comes first, and who will be expected to sponsor these meetings.
The TC will conduct its business via weekly teleconference calls. The time
of the call will be determined during the first meeting of the TC. The TC
will conduct F2F meetings on as needed basis. Teleconference facilities will
be sponsored by Nortel.
(2)(d) The names, electronic mail addresses and membership affiliations of
at least Minimum Membership who support this proposal and are committed to
the Charter and projected meeting schedule.
- Marwan Sabbouh, ms@mitre.org , MITRE
- Abbie Barbir, abbieb@nortel.com, Nortel
- Paul Knight, paul.knight@nortel.com, Nortel
- Hanane Becha, HANANEBE@nortel.com, Nortel
- Sriram Gopalan, gopalan_sri@bah.com, Booz Allen Hamilton
- Kajal Claypool, claypool@ll.mit.edu, MIT Lincoln Lab
- Rex Brooks, rexb@starbourne.com, Individual
- Brad Medairy, medairy_brad@bah.com, Booz Allen Hamilton
- Sandeep Maripuri , maripuri_sandeep@bah.com, Booz Allen Hamilton
- Peter Cotroneo, peterc@ll.mit.edu, MIT Lincoln Lab
- Aaron Braeckel, braeckel@ucar.edu, The University Corporation for
Atmospheric Research
- Sandeep Purao, spurao@ist.psu.edu, PSU
(2)(e) The name of the Convener who must be an Eligible Person.
Paul Knight (Nortel)
(2)(f) The name of the Member Section with which the TC intends to affiliate
with
None.
(2)(g) Optionally, a list of contributions of existing technical work that
the proposers anticipate will be made to this TC.
TBD
(2)(h) Optionally, a draft of frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document
regarding the planned scope of the TC, for posting on the TC's website.
None
(2)(i) Optionally, a proposed working title and acronym for the
specification(s) to be developed by the TC.
None
References
[1] XML Path Language (XPath) http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
[2] XML Schema: Component Designators http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-ref/
[3] Mapping XML Schema Primitives to RDF/OWL Primitives; MTR080089 MITRE
TECHNICAL REPORT
[4] Resource Description Framework http://www.w3.org/RDF/
[5] OWL Web Ontology Language http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/
[6] The Web of Mashup and Metadata Scripting Language
http://semanticweb.mitre.org/wmsl/
[7] Using Mapping Relations to Semi Automatically Compose Web Services IEEE
SERVICES 2008