A Visual Ontological Language for Technical Standards (VOLTS)

Research shows that failures in the standardization process often result from communication and organizational issues between those involved in the committee and the user community. This is mainly caused by two issues: first, a lack of integration of available standards development tools with communication and social interfaces; and second, to the difficulties inherent in organizing and collating information in a semantically meaningful manner. To this effect, the authors present a Visual Ontological Language for Technical Standards (VOLTS). VOLTS is a prototype environment that seeks to address the latter problem introduced above. In VOLTS, standards developers visually create standards within a network of information. VOLTS builds upon a tool developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) called the NIST Ontological Visualization Interface for Standards (NOVIS), which presented a novel method for visualizing the content and connections of standards, but lacked the ability to allow users to alter that information. VOLTS focuses on providing users with a process that allows for verification and validation at all stages of development. To that effect, VOLTS incorporates research done by NIST on building a Framework for Analysis Comparison, and Test of Standards (FACTS). The examples presented herein use the openly available standards World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Ontology Language (OWL) 2 and the Data Mining Group’s (DMG) Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) to demonstrate the VOLTS process and methodology. Future work discussed will seek to address the former problem introduced above.