RE: Re: SEMIS Bulletin
I would concur with Bill's comments re: STEP.
(I didn't know that EXPRESS even had the power of an FOL, but that is not my
area so I must defer to John.)
Regards,
Peter Eirich
tel: 240-228-7264 (This is a local exchange for DC and much of Northern
VA)
-----Original Message-----
From: Burkett, Bill [mailto:WBurkett@modulant.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 1:11 PM
To: cg@CS.UAH.EDU; Pat Hayes; sowa@BESTWEB.NET
Cc: Frederick Kintanar; standard-upper-ontology@listserv.ieee.org;
cl@philebus.tamu.edu; artem@cs.wayne.edu
Subject: RE: Re: SEMIS Bulletin
I'd like to contribute a little background on the subject of STEP and
EXPRESS and the development goals of these standards to add to what John has
said below:
> The STEP group focused on the much bigger problem of using the entire
> infrastructure (including the web) in order to put semantic modeling
> at the center of every aspect of the business process, including
> hardware and software design, development, manufacturing,
> distribution, and communication with clients and suppliers. I'll
> admit that there's more to the elephant, but STEP started with the
> brain and included a much bigger chunk than just the tail.
I do think that STEP has a long lead in trying to do the kinds of things
that are described as goals of the SW, but it didn't have an "entire
infrastructure" focus. The objective of STEP was to define a standard data
format for (initially) exchanging a complete product specification between
hetergeneous CAD/CAM systems (though the objectives have grown substantially
over the years). Although it had an integrative architecture (with respect
to the data), it was fundamentally source-to-target data exchange standard
(i.e., a "standard vocabulary") and did not include broader network
architecture concerns. Except for a few parts of the standard (dealing with
APIs and Java), it was almost exclusively about data. (STEP grew out of
effort called IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification), which was
designed to exchange computer graphics geometry between geometric modelling
systems.) The industrial sectors that contributed to STEP were principally
manufacturing concerns and!
their technology suppliers (and largely defense-related).
EXPRESS is billed as an "information modelling" language, but is basically
(IMHO) just a data modelling language. It is a synthesis of object and ER
modelling concepts and does not have any formal logic basis - or at least
that was not a design intent. That EXPRESS has the power of FOL (as John
observes) I am guessing is a by-product of the ER/relational influence on
the language design. There are no STEP reasoners in the AI/OWL sense that I
am aware of because the language was not designed for this purpose.
One point I will strongly echo from my STEP experience is Pete Kirkham's
observation: the SW/W3C community has no idea how difficult it is to obtain
agreement on a common understanding of the meaning of elements of a data
standard.
There are others on this list with STEP/EXPRESS backgrounds, so I would
invite them to add to or comment on my assessment here - which is purely my
own view.
For those interested in the STEP information architecture, I have an old but
not completely-outdated paper on the subject at
http://www.intergate.com/~wcb/ewc.pdf that appeared in Engineering With
Computers in 1995. (The graphics are bad in this copy, though - this was
done many years ago and I've never updated it with more powerful and capable
technology.)
Bill