Attending: Joel, Valerie, Peter, Anoop Kumar, Susan Albright, James

Joel started the call summarizing that we are interested in using VUE for authoring ontologies. Anoop introduced himself. He is the technical lead and architect at Tufts and lead architect on VUE. Joel explained that we are interested in tools that can help with the mapping of competencies. It is a classic semantic web problem. You have an ontology that describes relationships and expresses relationship among different comp schemes.

Valerie provided background on the need for a tool like Vue to author competencies. Many in medical education, both undergraduate medical education and certification, are interested in developing and using competency frameworks. At institutions like Tufts, they are interested in using competency frameworks to manage their curriculum and ensure that they are addressing important competencies. At the American Board of Surgery and other specialty certifying boards, they are interested in using competency frameworks to capture assessment information about physicians and ensure that they are demonstrating competence in all necessary areas.

Anoop explained that Vue is an open source project. Their goal is to create tools for managing digital resources. In addition it allows users to structure the content they are working with in concept maps. It is not limited to resources. The node can be linked to a resource or reference to something virtual. Or it could be linked to nothing and just be a concept. Until now they have had a set of tools to connect to repositories and present content. Now they are working on different layouts so that once content comes in, it can be layed out in graphical interface. Vue is based on a strong semantic framework that supports different metadata or schemas. They put them in rdf triples and perform search. If user wants to attach metadata or assign categories, they could load ontologies in and use them to assign categories.

As far as basic things we are looking for - gui for maps, sending back in XML or rdf - that is built in. Protégé lets you build ontology. But if there is an exploratory phase, vue may be the right tool. It allows you to create hierarchies and export into a schema. The vue map is xml, they could easily add export features in vue.

Peter asked if you can import an owl map and drop it in, then drag things out of ontology and drop it onto what you are creating. Anoop replied yes. You can use it in many ways. You can load an ontology with terms. Each node created has a meaning associated. The term hospital would have a particular meaning within a healthcare ontology. If hospital has characteristics associated with it in the ontology, those characteristics would be associated when the term is applied in Vue. You can also use it to add metadata to nodes.

Peter explained one use case: creating a competency map for what a surgery resident needs to know. One topic is is endocrine surgery. If the American Board of Surgery had published a collection of competencies, one could pull in those competencies and drag and drop them onto the map. Anoop confirmed that the map inherits the competency from the ontology. If you have a map about surgery, you realize there is a group who has developed an ontology, you could load that ontology into the panel and start creating associations with the map you've already created. They are differentiating metadata and ontologies. In the next round of development, they want to combine all of that. When an ontology is loaded, all of the properties associated with different parts of the ontology are loaded. For example, if car is defined in the ontology, the map would automatically adds mileage and price as characteristics, if they are defined properties of a car in the ontology.

Peter asked what options are available for saving the map. Anoop replied that maps are saved in .vue xml. You can also save as html file, jpg, etc.

Peter asked if it was possible to save back to OWL when you import an ontology. Anoop replied that owl ontologies are structured knowledge. What a user is doing is a personal view of that domain. They don't push it back into the owl ontology. Two potential use cases come up - defining competencies and relationships and saing it as an OWL file, and using the competencies to link competencies to resources. Users may prefer to save that as a map file. 

Peter commented that we are looking for simpler tools to create the ontology. That may involve importing snippets of other ontologies. He asked Anoop what tools are used to create the owl ontologies. Anoop replied mostly protégé is used.

Joel commented that you may have a competency definitions for a part spec, and that may need to be sophisticated, in which case you would need to use protégé. Then you have models that need to be related to each other and mapped to ontologies. Same as, subclass of, etc. We don't need all the properties of OWL.

Anoop commented that it is an easily handled use case in vue. Load multiple ontologies and drag classes and create a link. Or you can load an existing ontology and use predefined classes for defining relationships. Vue understands the relationships and creates rdf.  Joel clarified that Vue doesn't save OWL currently. Anoop confirmed that and replied that you could save it as rdf.

Peter asked what an ontology style sheetis. An educator could be local educator or a board level educator. How could we guide them to put the right data in? We need to select set of ways of describing links and select metadata for each node. Are there ways to do a style sheet that guide how you define relationships?

Anoop replied that a style sheet has to do with visual representation. 50 classes may come with a style sheet. If you want doctors to be square, students to be round and blue, managers to be red, you would use a style sheet. Once you load an ontology you could load a corresponding CSS style sheet.  

Peter asked if  info is available for any node? Anoop replied that info (further descriptive information) is available for both nodes and links.

Valerie commented that we could create an OWL ontology that defines the competency term and its properties - like an owl template.  Anoop commented that you could start with an owl template and use that to create a competency map or ontology. That's a possibility.

Peter commented that an organization could get the medbiquitous template, use it to create competencies, and those competencies could be used by other organization. We need the ability to export a format that can then be imported. Anoop replied that VUE xml format is tied to the tool. It would be easy to write it to another xml format, such as owl lite or a standard schema. Right now what goes into vue xml are position info, color, and other visual aspects that may not be necessary. You could pare it down to the essential information. They have done that for IMS- an ontology for learning objects, how they should be organized.  IMS Resource list XML is a scaled down version that can be loaded in IMS.  It is easier to write simpler xml. Susan commented that then you lose the visual part of it. That could be important to reuse.

P eter asked if vue invented their own specification for representing the map. Anoop replied that they  looked at a few, but they didn't fit their needs. So they ended up creating their own.

Valerie asked Susan and James if the proposed template for Vue could be helpful to them. Susan commented that it was still too early to tell, but that it did look promising. She offered to meet with Anoop to better describe the use cases for developing a competency framework in dentistry.

James commented that if you have repositories, you could use vue to embed completion data tied to a specific  surgical procedure.  You could reference a certificate from within the specific competency.

Peter commented that he was thinking it would be earlier in the educational lifecycle, when an organization is defining core competencies. A program director could use the ontology build onto it. The ontology could also be used to point to available resources. We would have to think more about mapping to case completion data.

Susan added that if you had a map of the competency, you would be able to say what content is linked to a specific competency. Student could say what proof they had that they met the competency. It could work from curriculum planner's perspective and student perspective. Anoop added you could use one competency to identify other relevant competencies. It would be good to try for a prototype.

Joel asked if other organizations contribute ot the Vue code. Anoop replied that they received a few contributions for an osid component (A service definition from the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative or OKI) . there is some interest in contributions for globalization, language support. But Tufts has been the core team. There is a nightly build to the community.

Joel commented that we need to download and try some of the scenarios to get a sense of what would have to be added to vue to accommodate OWL or another approach. Starting with people like James is a good idea. He also recommended getting the leaders of working group involved.

Anoop added that there will be changes to the system related to how you deal with ontologies and metadata. He is working on that; trying to build in such a way to seamlessly work together. He can work with our use cases.  He asked if OWL lite is sufficient.  Joel replied that OWL DL is what is usually needed. Anoop replied that if we can share some OWL DL ontologies, he would like to see how they work. Joel offered to look for some.

Joel asked if Anoop would be willing to join us on other calls. Anoop agreed. If there is application for ontologies, he would love to be part of it.