The aim of the meeting was to progress the work of the Semantic
Interoperability Working Group.
The mission of the Semantic Interoperability Working Group is to enable semantic interoperability on a global scale by fostering the development and
take-up of vendor-neutral semantic interoperability standards, best practices, and technologies. This will be accomplished by producing deliverables that prove semantic interoperability is real today, and demonstrating how it can add business value.
The meeting started by reviewing the interim conclusions of the Workshop on Information Architecture for SOA that had been held
on the Saturday and Sunday preceding the conference, and developing the final conclusions of that workshop.
The meeting then discussed a possible major enhancement of the Universal
Data Element Framework (UDEF):
the addition of further trees to accompany the existing object class
and property trees, in order that the UDEF should be able to resolve
additional types of semantic conflict. For example, the additional
trees might include data element representations. A number of interesting ideas
were explored. This would be a very significant change to the UDEF, and
the ideas must be discussed in detail before firm conclusions are reached.
Meanwhile, development of the UDEF in its existing form proceeds.
In a separate meeting, The Open Group Board approved publication of
version 1.04 of the UDEF, which contains some additions to previous
versions. The Semantic Interoperability Working Group meeting discussed
some further additions, which will result in Version 1.05, and
the Dutch translation of the English UDEF definitions, which will
form the Dutch component of UDEF Version 1.1. The comment period
in the formal review of the Dutch component had completed, with only editorial
changes requested, and it is hoped that the final version can be approved
within a few weeks. Work was also already in progress on French, German, and Chinese
components, and the meeting decided to add to these by starting work
on a South African version.
On Tuesday April 22 there was a UDEF training workshop.
The aim of this session was to give participants an in-depth
understanding of the UDEF and how to use it.
In a well-attended session, Ron Schuldt, Chair of the UDEF project of
The Open Group's Semantic Interoperability Working Group, gave a
detailed and comprehensive explanation of the UDEF.
