May 6, 2004

Casual Ontology Development

Members of the Mindswap Project have posted Lifecycle of a Casual Web Ontology Development Process for presentation at the WWW2004 WE-SW Workshop.

The paper begins with an interesting description of a short-hand version of OWL which is designed for rapid entry and clarity.

We limit expressivity (i.e. no support for nested restrictions etc) to maintain readability, yet provide sufficient building blocks to construct a basic ontology model quickly, that can be refined later using a more powerful ontology editing tool. A more formal approach to our shorthand notation is being developed at the side. Source.

Lifecycle then describes a design scenario in which Mindswap's SWOOPed toolkit is used to search for and import terms related to the ontology under construction.

Having found related concepts/properties that the user could potentially use in the ontology being created, the editor interface must provide the user with the ability to either link to the data directly (with or without importing the entire external ontology) or borrow a specific subset of it (using a copy-paste mechanism). Source.

April 9, 2004

Time and Place

Harry Chen's Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) provides situational awareness for a group of sensors, devices, and other information systems. The list of ontologies used by CoBrA gives you an idea of what can be reasoned by the system: device, location, context, and many more. Chen's quicktime demo shows the CoBrA rejecting facts which do not fit into its contextual state, as well as a visual representation of the RDF data involved (by way of Danny Ayers).