Any news and updates of general interest to CTWG members

• Update on Internet Identity Workshop #36 last week.
• Rieks Joosten won't be able to make the CTWG meeting on May 8th (private things).
• Rieks Joosten shared about a TNO project called EASSI: https://eassi.ssi-lab.nl/

Brian Richter Rieks Joosten 

Brian Richter: didn't attend the dev-meeting today due to a sick toddler. They have made good progress on the ingress tool, pulling in wiki glossaries and began outputting curated text which needs a bit more work. Ryan has become busy with other work so we will be transitioning this work back to me this week and I will be going full bore on it once my daughter can make it back to school.

Rieks Joosten: Chadha has received (and accepted) an offer to do a PhD at Delft University. Last week she was in the process of fixing some bugs in the tools. Unfortunately, integration into github was too cumbersome to get done. We're looking within TNO how this work can proceed.

Judith Fleenor Henk van Cann

Drummond Reed Neil Thomson 

The first TNO-hosted Terminology Design Training Workshop has been scheduled for the NA/EU meeting of the Trust Spanning Protocol Task Force on 03 May 2023 at 08:00-09:00 PT / 15:00-16:00 UTC. See this Github discussion thread for a discussion of the proposed terms to review at that workshop.

Drummond Reed asked Rieks how many terms he thought it would be reasonable to try to tackle in this workshop. Rieks suggested the following format:

1. ~15 mins to cover the introductory material.
2. ~5 mins per participant to define the criteria for the first term — both positive examples and negative examples.

The challenge is that if we have ~20 attendees, that process will take more than an hour. So they are discussing separating into smaller groups who go through the criteria discussion process, and then report back to the larger group. This process could result in a reproducible process could work through on a regular basis.

The key challenge is how to make this process work with larger groups, vs. a small group that can focus on resolving the criteria.

Rieks said that he is having similar experiences with the Data Spaces project that needs to define what Data Spaces are. It is an exciting project with great potential.

Drummond observed that he expected an effort to define such a mental model is very likely to be successful as long as the parties are approaching it in good faith. Rieks added that is also requires sufficient time for the process to work out—if the group needs to rush towards a certain deadline, that could be a blocker.

Rieks also said TNO is working on a handbook for making ontologies.

See this proposed charter. Discuss how we might want to proceed.

Note that in the last meeting, Rieks Joosten said that from his experience, the most effective mental models are those that directly address the needs of the business people requiring a solution.

Rieks Joosten shared screenshot #1 below that he used to differentiate between a mental model — that is internal to the mind of a single person — while a conceptual model is a conceptualization of a mental model that can be communicated to others by using simplifications of each concept. Each concept has properties and relations with other concepts. The criterion for determining if something is an instance of a concept or a property or a relation when combined with a term can then form a complete definition.

An example of a complete conceptual model for parties, actors, and actions is shown in screenshot #2 below.

This means that one person, with his/her own mental model(s) of the universe, can take advantage of multiple conceptual models. For example, physicists have two conceptual models of light: one as a particle and one as a wave. The power is that a single physicist can then, in his/her own mental model of the universe, see it through two conceptual models.

Rieks shared a work-in-progress document that fully defines mental and conceptual models. It also recommends a process whereby authors of documents that need terminology should write the document without actually using the terms, but in every instance where a term is needed, the author actually uses the criteria that describes the concept the author has in mind. This process will then produce clear criteria which will become the definition of the term — and ideally then suggest the term to map to that criteria — and whether that term will be a concept, property, or relation. And finally if it will produce a clear conceptual model.

Drummond inquired about if there will be a next revision of Riek's paper on Conceptual Models. Rieks said he would lets us know when the next version is out.

Rieks Joosten said that he will not be able to attend the next regular meeting on 08 May. Drummond Reed also has a conflict due to his travel to the European Identity Conference. So we will cancel that meeting and our next meeting will be Monday 22 May.

ACTION: Drummond Reed to notify Michelle Janata to cancel the 08 May 2023 CTWG meeting.