Tools

On Oct 12, 2005, at 5:04 PM, helen.chen@agfa.com wrote:

>
> Hi, Robert
>
> Two points I would like to make here:
>
> Point 1: tools, I could not agree with you more.
>
> I am a new "farmer" ploughing the fields - developing ontologies in  
> Healthcare, for semantic webized clinical pathways [1] or radiation  
> protection guidelines [2].  Ontologies will be produced at an  
> increasingly speed and volume, much the same way data being  
> generated today. Although you can preach to physicians "best  
> practice" in developing ontologies, I have no doubt that we will  
> have to interact with ontologies as diversify as the data we are  
> facing today. As a ontology developer, I am eagerly looking for  
> tools to make my life easier.

Helen's point is a very good one.

At the risk of stating what may or may not be obvious to all, there  
are several *general* tools that are focused on helping people create  
ontologies that may be useful.  In no particular order ...

Protege - http://protege.stanford.edu/ is an ontology editor that now  
has an OWL plugin http://protege.stanford.edu/plugins/owl/

SWOOP - http://protege.stanford.edu/ is a OWL Ontology Editor. There  
has been various discussions on this thread on "normalizing" (which  
I'm not quite sure I understand), but if its the same notion as  
modularizing / re-factoring / partitioning, the "partition" function  
SWOOP provides may be of use to some. I also particularly find the  
debugging capabilities very useful.

Altova's SemanticWorks - http://www.altova.com/ 
products_semanticworks.html is a new new RDF/OWL editor from the  
folks that built XMLSpy. Altova has provided complementary licenses  
for their tools to W3C members working in the area of Semantic Web. -  
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ws-desc/2005Oct/0006.html  
(member only)

and the list goes on...

I think a useful question *this* group might consider is "are these  
general tools directly useful by the HCLS domain, or is something  
more specific helpful". To elaborate on this further and ground this  
in specific suggestions, one area of work I could see occurring in  
the HCLSIG might be to form a "Tools Task-force". This task force (as  
a start) might take the DOAP [1] descriptions of tools being  
described in the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment working  
group [2] (and elsewhere) and annotate these with characteristics  
more relevant to the HCLS community. Annotations might include  
associating tags that are more specific and of particular interest to  
the HCLS domain, usage and implementation experiences, how these  
tools are being used in production, what worked what didn't. etc.

Thoughts? Anyone want to take a crack at what specific  
characteristics might be useful to folks in this community and draft  
a proposal for such a task force?

[1] http://usefulinc.com/doap
[2] http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/cat_applications_and_demos.html

--
eric miller                              http://www.w3.org/people/em/
semantic web activity lead               http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
w3c world wide web consortium            http://www.w3.org/

Received on Friday, 14 October 2005 16:33:20 UTC