[x3d-public] X3D Semantic Web minutes 5 March 2020: modified meeting time, essential books, Apache, DFDL pipeline and 3D conversions

[Don Brutzman]

Attendees.  Jakub Flotyński and Don Brutzman

[0.1]    Web3D Teleconference Information
          https://www.web3d.org/member/teleconference-information

> Please use the following link for all Web3D Consortium Meetings.
>
> Join URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81634670698?pwd=a1VPeU5tN01rc21Oa3hScUlHK0Rxdz09

Confirmed that no Web3D Consortium member-only information is in these minutes.

No formal meeting last few weeks.

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1. Ontology Goals and Schedule.

[1.1]	X3D Ontology for Semantic Web
      	https://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/semantics

We will try a new routine, Tuesdays 08-0900 pacific time.  Hopefully this time will remain consistent so that others can join.

Have updated Web3D Calendar.

[1.2]	Web3D Calendar
      	https://www.web3d.org/calendar/month

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2. Books and formal review of X3D Ontology.

We should study each of these closely and refine X3D Ontology as we proceed.

[2.1]	Flotyński, Jakub. Knowledge-Based Explorable Extended Reality Environments.
      	https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030599645

- Review chapter 3
- Can we compose/correlate/harmonize X3D Ontology with Explorable Extended Reality (E-XR) Ontology?

[2.2]	Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, Third Edition: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL
      	James Hendler, Dean Allemang, and Fabien Gandon
      	Third edition, ACM Books, 2020
    	http://books.acm.org/titles#tab294

- End-to-end review
- SHACL https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl
- SKOS  https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos
- Quantities Units Dimensions Types

[2.3]	Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology.
     	By Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew D. Spear
      	https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-ontologies-basic-formal-ontology

- generality considerations of ontology constructs

[2.4]	Mastering Structured Data on the Semantic Web. From HTML5 Microdata to Linked Open Data. Sikos, Leslie.
      	https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484210505

- end-to-end review, much detail to check/confirm/add
- general 3D ontology mapping

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3. Apache

Found a tremendous movie on open source.  Recommended.

[3.1]	https://www.apache.org

[3.2]	video "Trillions and Trillions Served"
      	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUt2nb0mgwg

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4. Data Format Definition Language (DFDL)

As noted in [1.1] under Design, for mapping to many different 3D formats someday, we first need to parse them:

* "use Apache Daffodil (DFDL) to actually parse and subsequently query those other formats coherently."

Significant progress on that front.
- Open Grid Forum (OGF) formally advanced DFDL approval and advancement to Version 1.0
- Apache Software Foundation has advanced the Daffodil project from Incubating status to Top Level Project.

==========================================
[4.1]	The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Daffodil™ as a Top-Level Project
      	https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces74

"Our research on applying Data Format Description Language (DFDL) is exploring how to unlock and archive a plethora of diverse data streams from unmanned systems," said Don Brutzman, Naval Postgraduate School. "Both the DFDL standard and the Apache Daffodil open-source implementation provide a big benefit for these potential capabilities. Continuing work at Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) hopes to make telemetry from field experimentation and simulation repeatably tractable for Big Data analytics."
==========================================

Namely, we have produced a preprocessor/postprocessor for DFDL that enables decoration of XML schemas that define both elements and attributes.

[4.2]	DFDL Pipeline
      	https://gitlab.nps.edu/Savage/robodata/-/tree/master/DFDL/pipeline

[4.3]	DFDL Pipeline diagrams
      	https://gitlab.nps.edu/Savage/robodata/-/tree/master/DFDL/pipeline/images

This means we might decorate customized copies of X3D4 XML Schema with DFDL markup, allowing us to parse/unparse any other 3D format that has corresponding data structures.

TODO goal: write a VRML parser by defining VRML syntax as DFDL markup and adding it to an "X3D4VRML" schema.

Of note is that DFDL provides both parsing and unparsing with a single schema, two-way conversion capabilities (unlike lex, yacc, antlr, others).

Thus, if we can figure out data-structure correspondences between X3D and any other 3D file format, then we can customize an X3D4 schema for that other format, parsing directly into X3D, and thus permitting semantic query across file formats.

So, no shortage of work to do.  Ready or not, having fun with X3D!  8)

all the best, Don
-- 
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br       brutzman at nps.edu
Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA   +1.831.656.2149
X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics http://faculty.nps.edu/brutzman