D2.2 TAS3 Common Upper Ontologies v1.8 open for public review

June 2009 version (v1.8) of deliverable D2.2 (TAS3 Common Upper Ontologies) is open to public comments, feedback and review !

All feedback welcome !

You could download it and publish comment from here:

http://www.tas3.eu/project/publications/download

Executive Summary

The TAS3 project aims at developing a trusted Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabling secure exchange of information across (human and non-human) agents. A SOA decomposes complex processes into manageable and reusable services to respond to changing business environments. Furthermore, it facilitates the collaboration between any numbers of organisations to provide combined services. As a result, all partners in the Trust Network (TN) need to agree upon a common understanding for the technical underpinning of the services as well as a common vocabulary for goods and data.

One of the goals of the TAS3 project is to exploit Semantic Web technologies to address this problem. The Semantic Web extends the current World Wide Web (WWW) with resources in machine-readable form. On the one hand, each organisation needs to document their respective services in well documented standards (e.g. SOAP and WSDL). On the other hand, the resources (e.g. personal information) being exchanged need to be given adequate semantics to know which services have to be used. These types of resources are given meaning through the use of ontologies.

This document describes the TAS3 ontology developed by STARLab. We first introduce a Descriptive Upper Ontology (UO) that could be applied to any domains. This upper ontology is different from existing ones as (i) it is grounded in natural language, and (ii) provides a descriptive framework to capture real world semantics. As a result, the upper ontology can be re-used in a non-restrictive manner.

Furthermore, we extracted important concepts from IT standards (e.g. ISO/IEC 15008, 17799) to develop the Upper Common Ontology (UCO). A UCO contains the conceptualizations and semantic constraints that are common to and accepted by a domain.
As such, we believe that standards provide a vocabulary of terms (agreed upon by domain experts) and that this can provide a starting point for the TAS3 conceptualisation. Annotating (web) services with security concepts would allow the correct semantic interpretation of security paradigms and data protection regulations (addressing privacy) and thus increase the trust in the TN. In this first iteration, we have mainly concentrated on security and data protection aspects.