=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-218/paper-11
|storemode=property
|title=A Proposal for a W3C XG on Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-218/pos_paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-218
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/LaskeyLC06
}}
==A Proposal for a W3C XG on Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-218/pos_paper5.pdf
A Proposal for a W3C XG on Uncertainty Reasoning
for the World Wide Web
Kenneth J. Laskey# Paulo Cesar G. da Costa, Kathryn B. Laskey
MITRE Corporation, M/S H305 School of Information Technology and Engineering,
7515 Colshire Drive George Mason University
McLean, VA 22102-7508 USA 4400 University Drive
klaskey@mitre.org Fairfax, VA 22030-4444 USA
{pcosta, klaskey}@gmu.edu
Abstract. The Semantic Web envisions effortless cooperation between humans and
computers, seamless interoperability and information exchange among web applications,
and rapid and accurate identification and invocation of appropriate Web services. At the
current stage of evolution in Semantic Web research, there is a growing understanding
that a major step towards this vision involves the implementation of principled uncertainty
representation and reasoning in SW applications. This position paper introduces initial
thoughts on how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Incubator XG process could be
employed to move forward the concept of a Web with uncertainty.
Motivation
The ability of current-generation Web technology to handle uncertainty is extremely
limited, providing an inadequate foundation for knowledge interchange and application
interoperability. Different applications have different ontologies, different semantics, and
different knowledge and data stores. Legacy applications are usually only partially
documented and may rely on tacit usage conventions that even proficient users do not
fully understand or appreciate. Further, the data that must be exchanged in the context of
the Semantic Web is often fraught with uncertainty.
This suggests that effective methods for representing and reasoning under uncertainty
in complex, open-world environments could be of vital importance to the success of the
Semantic Web (SW). Although OWL provides the means for annotating ontologies with
numeric uncertainty measures and has the power to represent much of the necessary
structural information, there is no established foundation for doing so. This means each
developer must come up with his/her own set of OWL constructs for representing
uncertainty. This is a recipe for disaster in an environment so dependent on
interoperability among systems and applications.
Apart from the interoperability nightmare caused by proprietary uncertainty
representation schemas for SW applications/systems, there are ancillary issues such as
representational power vs. simplicity of uncertainty representations, which uncertainty
# ·The author's affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for identification purposes only,
and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE's concurrence with, or support for, the positions,
opinions or viewpoints expressed by the author.
representation technique(s) meet the requirements posed by SW applications, how to
ensure the consistency of probabilistic representational models and ontologies, etc. None
of these issues can be addressed in a principled way by using the current classical logic-
based OWL formalism.
Moving Forward Using W3C Incubator XG
The W3C has recently created the Incubator process
[http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/about.html] to provide a formal, yet flexible venue to
better understand Web-related challenges and their potential solutions. It encourages a
public exploration of the issues and potential solutions before the solutions are mature
enough for standardization, and provides a “head start” if the Incubator experimental
group, the XG, is able to adequately formulate the principles and techniques that will
likely gain consensus in the wider community.
The Incubator XG process provides an attractive mechanism to explore and better
define the challenges of reasoning with and representing uncertain information in the
context of Semantic Web development. Even further, it could leverage work being done
on Semantic Web Services (SWS) to identify where the combination of semantics and
uncertainty can further the Web Services vision of quickly and efficiently composing
services and data resources to address the needs of user in an ever-changing world.
To this end, the objectives of an Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web XG
(URW3-XG) would be twofold: first, to identify and describe situations on a Web scale
for which uncertainty reasoning would significantly increase the potential for extracting
useful information; second, to identify methodologies that can be applied to these
situations and the fundamentals of a standardized representation that could serve as the
basis for information exchange necessary for these methodologies to be effectively used.
For the first objective, the URW3-XG would compile a set of use case descriptions,
based on an initial list of examples to be included in the URW3-XG charter and then
soliciting and further developing other examples of the kinds of information management
challenges that would benefit (and if available, have already benefited) most from
mechanisms for reasoning under uncertainty. Areas to be considered include situations
related to Web services, such as runtime identification of processing and data resources
and resolution of policy objectives, and how probabilistic reasoning techniques could help
to deal with trust issues.
For the second objective, the URW3-XG will investigate proposed and implemented
solutions that may be applied to the use cases developed under the first objective and that
show promise as candidate solutions for uncertainty reasoning in the Semantic Web. In
part, this will also involve exploring the feasibility and desirability of layering uncertainty
reasoning with existing Semantic Web reasoning languages and tools. The investigation
would not advocate the choice of any one particular solution over others, but would seek
to identify the type of information that would need to be saved as part of a resource
description and transmitted to a reasoning engine for useful processing. The output of this
work could form the basis of a future standardization effort.