Q&A Session for "The National Information Exchange Model and Semantic-Driven Development"

Following the webcast, Dan McCreary answered questions from the live audience. Here is a transcript of that discussion.

Q: My understanding is that NIEM is not considered a Federal Information Exchange Model and does incorporate Federal, State, Local, Tribal and Private Sector partners.

A:[Dan McCreary] I am not sure of the meaning of the question. NIEM is a US federal standard and is being used by federal, state, local, tribal and private sector partners. Perhaps the word "not" was a typo? Please see the NIEM web site for more details.

Q: Does NIEM and/or DATA.gov contain vocabularies expressed in RDF/OWL?

A: Not exactly, but you can easily convert the NIEM Core and other XML Schema files into an OWL file. The code is only about 20 lines of XQuery. Please send me an e-mail at dan@danmccreary.com if you would like a me to send you a copy of the source. I have published it using an Open Source Apache 2.0 license.

Q: When would one use SKOS in place the ISO/IEX Metadata repository standard?

A: SKOS is typically used at the beginning stages of the creation of a metadata registry. You start by capturing preferred business terms and their definitions using a simple SKOS editing tool (also available as an open source XRX application for eXist). Next you can start to group related terms using the "broader" tag. After that you can start to link terms together in a taxonomy and classify terms into subsets using "SKOS Schemas" for ISO classifiers. You can then start to see your full ontology forming from the business terms that are grouped together. From there you can mark each SKOS "concept" as being a potential "Conceptual Data Element" and migrate it into your ISO/IEC registry. From there you can create OWL reports.

Q: Sorry, that meant to ask, when would one use SKOS in place of the ISO/IEC Metadata Repository standard?

A: See above

Q: What is a uri?

A: A universal resource identifier. It is like a URL but it might only point to a "concept", but not necessarily a real web page. It is really a way of creating a site-specific way of identifying resources so that they can be merged with other resources on the internet.

Q: What is your view regarding acceptance of alias’es for element names?

A: Aliases are VERY important for aiding search, but should always be marked as such. Aliases are important for fundability of a the "official" or "preferred" term. But tools should prevent people from ever putting aliases in wantlists or subschemas. This would make it harder to merge graphs from different systems.