This paper describes the work of the W3C Decisions and Decision-making Incubator1, with the goal to identify requirements for a standard decision format, through a set of use cases, and to develop a rst version of a potential standard format for representing decisions, ful lling the requirements of the use cases and exploiting semantic web standards. Ongoing e orts include the identi cation and modelling of `decision patterns' and development of proof-ofconcept applications to validate assumptions and patterns.
The time and e ort we spend converting our decisions into
work products, such as briefs, proposals, and communication
of decisions in meetings, conversations, and emails, could be
reduced if we had a standard format for representing and
sharing decisions. Our tools could be instrumented to
generate our decisions in a format that could be shared and also
track the state of decisions within the decision-making
process. Instrumentation could support the development of a
metric of information ow and help us optimize our decision
processes across our organization or enterprise [
Sharing decisions across a broad and diverse set of users
and systems is an important aspect of situational awareness
in many domains, for instance, in emergency management2.
During an emergency, decisions must be shared among
emergency managers and rst responders from multiple
organizations, jurisdictions, and functional capabilities. For
example, decisions to route patients must be shared among rst
responders in the eld who are sending the patients, those
who are doing the transport, the medical facilities receiving
the patients, and the patient's families and relatives.
1For more information, or to participate in the Decisions Incubator,
please review the charter at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/de
cision/charter and visit the wiki at http://www.w3.org
/2005/Incubator/decision/wiki/Main Page.
2For more information on emergency and incident management, see
for example the National Incident Management System, December
2008, published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at
http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/nims/NIMS core.pdf.
First responders and emergency managers work under
difcult conditions using current mechanisms for information
sharing; they need improved solutions. For example,
paperbased Incident Command forms provide an initial
standardization of emergency information3. An Incident Command
Structure (ICS) can organize responders into a hierarchical
structure of sections (e.g. Operations, Planning, Logistics,
Finance) and roles (e.g. Incident Commander, Public
Information O cer, Safety O cer)4. XML-based standards
are being developed to improve sharing of emergency
information. The Organization for the Advancement of
Structured Information Systems (OASIS) has a family of
standards known as the Emergency Data Exchange Language
(EDXL)5. The Emergency Data Exchange Language
Common Alerting Protocol (EDXL-CAP) exempli es simple,
useful, and understandable information-exchange formats. What
EDXL-CAP did for alerts, a Common Decision Exchange
Protocol (CDEP) could do for decisions [
An important next step is to utilize the semantic web
standards, including RDF, SPARQL, OWL and GRDDL to
integrate information for dynamic queries across datasets, and
for inferencing using the underlying ontologies (e.g.
indicating that the emergency equipment named X in one
jurisdiction is the same as the type named Y in another
jurisdiction). Initial steps in this direction are already being taken,
e.g., through the OASIS Distribution Element (DE)
supporting packaging and addressing of emergency management
information for purposes such as routing. The standard
has links to externally-managed `lists' representing concepts
such as `senderRole', `receiverRole' and `keywords'.
Ontologies should encapsulate, in a machine-understandable
manner, such information sharing policies. Implicitly present
is the underlying decision-making process, continuing at all
levels through an emergency. The decision format advocated
in this paper will support the move toward the use of linked
data [
The need for representing, sharing and managing decisions in a machine-understandable format is not exclusive to emergency management. One example of another critical 3For examples of incident command forms, see http://training. fema.gov/EMIWeb/IS/ICSResource/ICSResCntr Forms.htm. 4For more information on ICS, see the online training provided by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, Lesson 3, at http://emilms.fema.gov/IS100A/indexMenu.htm. 5For a good overview of EDXL, see http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/EDXL. The EDXL family of standards is available at the OASIS website: http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php. domain of interest is organizational innovation. Each person is a `decision-maker' at some level in the organization. The decisions a person makes are critical to the success of an organization, so aspects of decision-making and objective measures of the decision-making process become signi cant. Decisions involve weighing reasonable options based on metrics in order to take an action. If we granulize the decisionmaking process by considering each member of our organization as a decision-maker, then we can support the representation and sharing of individual innovative actions. Most organizations attempt to solve this problem through direct or indirect person-to-person communication (e.g., meetings, telecons) or unstructured collaborative tools (email, chat, wiki). XML formats can support notice-type publishing of activities, e.g, RSS or ATOM feeds; however, there remains an opportunity to showcase semantic standards to capture decision-making to improve the querying, inferencing, and integration with underlying ontology support.
The focus of this paper is on the information sharing aspects of a decision, which is fostered by a format which is concise, generic, i.e., domain independent, and tiered. The more concise the format, the more quickly it can be understood and accepted by developers and users alike. 1.2
The work performed by this incubator activity is designed
to help organizations improve integration of human decisions
into computer systems, to track and manage digitally the
decision-making process, to enable improved
informationow metrics, to maintain an archive of the decisions and
the decision-making process, to enable semi-automation of
certain decision-making processes, to improve information
sharing, and ultimately, to support better, rapid, and agile
decision making [
In summary the main goals of the incubator are: To discover a set of requirements for a standard decision format, through a set of use cases.
To develop a draft of a potential standard format for representing decisions, ful lling the requirements of the use case and exploiting semantic web standards.
Creating a vocabulary for expressing decisions that exploits semantic web standards means, in practice, creating a set of ontology modules that can be linked in a network, to be used independently or together in di erent combinations. The main tools we use for this practical task is the eXtreme Design ontology engineering methodology and the notion of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs), supported by the ontology development environment NeOn Toolkit6. 6http://www.neon-toolkit.org
Under the assumption that classes of problems in ontology
design can be solved by applying common solutions (as
experienced in software engineering), ODPs can support design
reusability. ODPs can be of several types [
CPs are collected in di erent catalogues, such as the ODP
portal 9. In addition to their diagrammatic representation,
CPs are described using catalogue-entry elds (c.f. software
pattern templates), such as name, intent, covered
requirements, consequences, and building block, linking to an OWL
realization of the pattern. The requirements an ODP covers
are expressed using Competency Questions (CQs) [
eXtreme Design
With the name `eXtreme Design' (XD) we identify an
agile approach to ontology engineering [
XD is a test-driven and task-focused approach that
results in highly modular ontologies. The main principles of
XD include the intensive use of CPs, and extensive
collaboration [
In this section we describe our ongoing e orts and how we apply the XD methodology to support these e orts. We proceed in a bottom-up fashion, starting from the use cases and deriving requirements for a representation format that can be realized as ontology modules based on ODPs. However, we have also encountered a number of cases where this leads to the development of general ODPs themselves. 3.1
Use cases are in our context general scenarios, horizontal with respect to application domains (i.e., they are represented in multiple domains), where the envisioned decision format can give some substantial bene t. So far, ve use cases have been identi ed (the list is continuously extended). The use cases are intended to be general and not domain speci c, in terms of industry domain. Their detailed description, including resulting requirements in the form of CQs can be found in the Incubator wiki10. Background and related work for two of the use cases are described more in depth in Sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2.
Measuring Information Flow - Where a decision process representation can help answering questions such as `When did a certain process begin and end?', `How much time was spent on a certain step in the process?', and `What is the average time for making a certain type of decision?'.
Linked Data Supporting Decisions - Where linked
data [
Research shows that an analytical solution of information
velocity is intractable but metrics that support the
understanding of information ow can be useful [
Design considerations have been described and
exemplied for implementing a decision-acquisition system based on
a CDEP [
The decision patterns include concrete decision format components, as well as generic patterns, hence, both: The ontology modules that we propose as a starting point for creating a standard in this eld, and the more general ODPs that we discover and develop as a result of this e ort.
The rst module draft that was produced corresponds to the use case of `Measuring Information Flow' listed above. This ontology module is a specialization of the Transition ODP11. In this case we found an ODP already available that we could specialize and create a speci c decision-process pattern. In other cases, such as when viewing a decision as a past event, no `event-pattern' was available in the ODP portal. Therefore, we are creating general ODPs to be specialized in the decision ontology modules. By treating general (rather than domain-speci c) use cases of decision-making, we make sure that the developed modules are actually reusable patterns, rather than a solution tailored to one speci c application. All decision patterns will be implemented in RDF/OWL. Eight patterns are identi ed so far, but need to be created. Four examples are described below:
A `Statement with variable'-pattern, to describe queries, such as the question underlying a decision. `Filter' and `Aggregation'-patterns, where a lter would represent criteria applicable to some data, e.g., a set 11http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/wiki/Submissions:Transition of options, and an aggregation would represent a way to combine data, e.g., grouping options.
A `Normalization'-pattern that models transformations of values into a common scale, for comparing options. A `Weighting'-pattern to express the relative importance of data, e.g., weighting of assessment criteria. 3.3
To verify the requirements and the ontology modules, and
to demonstrate the usefulness of such a format, a
demonstration system is being developed at the Space and Naval
Warfare Systems Center Paci c. Initially, the system will focus
on enabling decision making using open linked data sets [
An important outcome, apart from the requirements and a proposed decision representation, will be experiences related to the XD methodology and ODPs. XD has been used in the project both as a framework for the modelling but also as a means for teaching ontology engineering to participants less familiar with semantic technologies. So far we found that the level of detail of the XD methodology is highly bene cial for teaching ontology engineering to novice modelers. It introduces an intuitive way of scoping the problem, through modularization, and it allows the modeler to draw on previous experiences of others through ODPs. We envision that the project will bene t the further development of XD, and XD will be validated through valuable experiences.
In September 2010, the project reached its half-way point and should be completed by the end of March 2011. By that time the project will have a set of requirements for a potential decision-representation standard, i.e., the use cases (initial set in Section 3.1), and a rst draft of such a representation, i.e., the decision patterns (initial ideas in Section 3.2). We intend to submit any patterns developed (both general and speci c to decision-making) to the ODP portal. We expect to present a set of proof-of-concept applications (see Section 3.3). These applications will show the potential of our draft patterns. The applications will be used to validate our results against current practices in di erent domains, e.g., to validate the hypothesis that linked data are suitable to support decision making and that automatic assessment of options is possible in certain use cases. During the project, we will make the problems and possible solutions visible in di erent communities, e.g., the semantic web community, domain speci c interest groups, and standards organizations. We envision that at the end of the project we can propose a standardization e ort in the context of W3C. We can pursue several use cases and application ideas as separate research projects. 5.
The authors thank the O ce of Naval Research for their support of this work. This paper is the work of U.S. Government employees performed in the course of their employment and no copyright subsists therein. 6.