Members of the OASIS ebXML Registry Technical Committee have approved a September 2006 Committee Draft version of "ebXML Registry Profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL) Version 1.5" as a new Committee Specification. The document defines the ebXML Registry profile for publishing, management, discovery and reuse of OWL Lite Ontologies.
The ebXML Registry holds the metadata for the RegistryObjects and the documents pointed at by the RegistryObjects reside in an ebXML repository. The basic semantic mechanisms of ebXML Registry are classification hierarchies (ClassificationScheme) consisting of ClassificationNodes and the Association Types among RegistryObjects. Furthermore, RegistryObjects can be assigned properties through a slot mechanism and RegistryObjects can be classified using instances of Classification, ClassificationScheme
and ClassificationNodes.
Given these constructs, considerable amount of semantics can be defined in the registry. However, currently semantics is becoming a much broader issue than it used to be since several application domains are making use of ontologies to add knowledge to their data and applications. As a part of this initiative, W3C's Web Ontology Working Group defined Web Ontology Language (OWL). Naturally, there is lot to be gained from using a standard ontology definition language, like OWL, to express semantics in ebXML registries.
This document normatively defines the ebXML Registry profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL) Lite. More specifically, this document normatively specifies how OWL Lite constructs should be represented by ebXML RIM constructs without causing any changes in the core ebXML Registry specifications. Furthermore, this document normatively specifies the code to process some of the OWL semantics through parameterized stored procedures that should be made available from the ebXML Registry. Although this Profile is related to ebXML Registry specifications and not to any particular implementation, in order to be able to give concrete examples, the freebXML Registry implementation is used.
The ebXML Registry holds the metadata for the RegistryObjects and the documents pointed at by the RegistryObjects reside in an ebXML repository. The basic semantic mechanisms of ebXML Registry are classification hierarchies (ClassificationScheme) consisting of ClassificationNodes and the Association Types among RegistryObjects. Furthermore, RegistryObjects can be assigned properties through a slot mechanism and RegistryObjects can be classified using instances of Classification, ClassificationScheme
and ClassificationNodes.
Given these constructs, considerable amount of semantics can be defined in the registry. However, currently semantics is becoming a much broader issue than it used to be since several application domains are making use of ontologies to add knowledge to their data and applications. As a part of this initiative, W3C's Web Ontology Working Group defined Web Ontology Language (OWL). Naturally, there is lot to be gained from using a standard ontology definition language, like OWL, to express semantics in ebXML registries.
This document normatively defines the ebXML Registry profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL) Lite. More specifically, this document normatively specifies how OWL Lite constructs should be represented by ebXML RIM constructs without causing any changes in the core ebXML Registry specifications. Furthermore, this document normatively specifies the code to process some of the OWL semantics through parameterized stored procedures that should be made available from the ebXML Registry. Although this Profile is related to ebXML Registry specifications and not to any particular implementation, in order to be able to give concrete examples, the freebXML Registry implementation is used.
